"We don't sell technical drawings except when they are incorporated into a drawing or a collage"
About this Quote
Christo draws a firm boundary between utility and art. The vast installations he created with Jeanne-Claude depended on meticulous engineering: load calculations, wind studies, anchor points, crane schedules, permits. Those documents were instruments, not ends. Refusing to sell standalone technical drawings kept the logistical backbone of the work from becoming a collectible fetish and preserved the integrity of the artistic gesture.
Their strategy of self-financing sharpened this distinction. Because the monumental projects were temporary and never for sale, the pair rejected sponsorship and raised money by selling studies, photomontages, and collages. These objects were not mere documentation; they wove maps, photographs, engineering notations, and fabric samples into an image that carried the project’s sensual promise. A schematic detail might appear, but only as an element in a larger, authored surface where string suggested tension, cloth swatches caught light like the future installation, and hand-drawn lines staged the drama of scale and site. The transformation of a technical artifact into a visual poem marked the point at which something functional became art.
That stance also honored collaboration. Purely technical drawings often belonged to teams of engineers and fabricators whose work was bound to practical constraints. By withholding those from the market, Christo kept the focus on the vision rather than the bureaucracy, and he avoided monetizing a category of work that was collective and instrumental. When incorporated into a collage, the data entered an expressive field where authorship was clear and the piece spoke to imagination, risk, and place.
There is a quiet ethics in that policy. Means serve ends; they are not trophies. The world saw The Gates, Wrapped Reichstag, or Running Fence for a brief season, then only through memory and images. What remained for collectors were works that embodied the dream and communicated the project’s living energy, not the paperwork that made it possible.
Their strategy of self-financing sharpened this distinction. Because the monumental projects were temporary and never for sale, the pair rejected sponsorship and raised money by selling studies, photomontages, and collages. These objects were not mere documentation; they wove maps, photographs, engineering notations, and fabric samples into an image that carried the project’s sensual promise. A schematic detail might appear, but only as an element in a larger, authored surface where string suggested tension, cloth swatches caught light like the future installation, and hand-drawn lines staged the drama of scale and site. The transformation of a technical artifact into a visual poem marked the point at which something functional became art.
That stance also honored collaboration. Purely technical drawings often belonged to teams of engineers and fabricators whose work was bound to practical constraints. By withholding those from the market, Christo kept the focus on the vision rather than the bureaucracy, and he avoided monetizing a category of work that was collective and instrumental. When incorporated into a collage, the data entered an expressive field where authorship was clear and the piece spoke to imagination, risk, and place.
There is a quiet ethics in that policy. Means serve ends; they are not trophies. The world saw The Gates, Wrapped Reichstag, or Running Fence for a brief season, then only through memory and images. What remained for collectors were works that embodied the dream and communicated the project’s living energy, not the paperwork that made it possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Christo
Add to List
