Gates-ploitation, part trois

We’re hoping you were too busy this weekend—perhaps visiting Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Gates” themselves—to notice "Gates" parodies (and really funny ones) have sprung up on the Internet. Saturday’s New York Times introduced us to two such art installations, “The Somerville Gates” (pictured above), and “The Crackers", featuring those cheese crackers with the peanut butter inside we used to wolf down when our palate was less refined (at left). We never had thought of those crackers as being saffron-colored, but the verisimilitude, or whatever, between the Gates and those crackers, um, cracked us up.

But there are others, such as this one we found on BoingBoing. Both "The Somerville Gates"—created by a man in his apartment in Somerville, Mass.—and “The Crackers” had a shelf-life so brief they make Christo’s 16-day installation seem as durable as The Fantastiks. "The Somerville Gates" were only “up” until the cleaning lady came, and “The Crackers” was fed to Central Park ducks roughly a half-hour after it was unveiled.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

February 21, 2005 | Permalink