Christo Lecture at the Corcoran

For those of you who heard about Michael Cullen's lecture about Christo and the Gates Project in Central Park from DCist yesterday, let me give you a little recap. I would ask for commentary, but from a quick glance around the room last night, I doubt that many DCist readers made it to the talk. You didn't miss all that much.

Cullen is an architectural historian and friend/project director for Christo and Jean-Claude. As his story goes, he was the first person who asked Christo to wrap the Reichstag. And their relationship took off from there. Cullen spent a long time talking about the 23 years of political wrangling that was needed to convince the German government to let Christo wrap the Reichstag.

The talk went pretty much like this:
"I sent Christo a postcard saying that he should wrap the Reichstag. Christo said good idea. We talked to some people in charge. One guy said yes. He was replaced by a guy who said no. Twenty years later he was replaced by a woman who said ok. Then we did it. We changed the public perception of the Reichstag through our work of public art. Did I mention that Christo and I are BFF"

He then talked about the Gates project for two minutes. For more information than Cullen provided on the Gates go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or here. He did say that the gates were going to be yellow, and that the use of fabric is very important in Christo's work.

To close on the thoughts of the gf "For $15 you thought we would at least see some slides."