Critic
How One Man Brought Conceptual Art to the Masses
In the new documentary Walking on Water, the artist Christo proves that if you build it and it’s big, the crowds will come. Now, to pay for it all.
The artist Christo and his late wife/collaborator Jeanne-Claude have used fabric to spectacular effect. They wrapped Germany’s Reichstag in polypropylene, “hung” a curtain across a Colorado Valley, and, in 2016, built a floating, 3-kilometer-long walkway across a lake in northern Italy for a work called The Floating Piers.
The installation lasted just 16 days, and was intended to have a maximum daily capacity of 45,000 people.