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Given glimpses of what Christo and Jeanne-Claude are up against, you can scarcely blame his anger. You could understand the bureaucratic opposition if leaders were merely expressing qualms that the project would wind up costing the city or state money, or if the projects would permanently alter the landscape. But given the readiness with which the Christos refute those reservations (for instance, an environmental study for "Surrounded Islands" in Biscayne Bay showed it posed no danger to the plant or marine life), it's fair to assume that something else is going on.

Portfolio Photographs of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work. (You will need the Flash plugin to view the images.)

The drama of Christo's lobbying for approval is one that prefigured the government battles over art that have erupted periodically over the last 10 years. His work isn't confrontational or shocking. Nonetheless Christo is facing down nothing less than a deep suspicion of art itself, a fear of what's different and a suspicion of Christo himself as a foreigner. (Having lived in the United States since 1964, he is an American citizen.) The remarkable thing about the behavior the Maysles capture on camera is that Christo's opponents don't seem to realize how fully they give away their prejudices.

By far the sleaziest of their opponents is a Miami councilman named Harvey Ruvin, one of the most opportunistic hustlers it will ever be your amazement to watch in action. Ruvin tries to couch his objections to the "Surrounded Islands" project in civic pride, saying he can't help feeling there's something "chauvinistic" about Christo's proposed use of the islands in Biscayne Bay. He reveals his real agenda soon enough when he tells one of Christo's advisors that some monetary "flow back to the resource" will ensure his yes vote. When the advisor balks, Ruvin drops the public-servant lingo altogether. "Ever hear the phrase 'payback's a bitch'?" he asks. Ruvin finally accepted Christo's offer to donate 1,000 signed posters that the city could sell, but what astonishes you as you watch his naked grasping is how fully he revealed himself.

Why would any artist put up with that? The answer is that time and time again Christo's work has the uncanny ability to sweep ordinary people who have never given a thought about the place of art in their lives into its spell. It's profoundly moving to see people discovering a capacity to respond to beauty that they may never have suspected they had in them.

A diner waitress looks at the skeleton of the "Running Fence" and marvels that it allows her to see the contours of the land. One of the ranchers whose land it passes through takes some buddies to see the completed fence so they can admire how solidly it's constructed and suddenly blurts out that he thinks he'll come out and sleep by it that night. Most eloquent of all is a construction worker who helped hang the "Valley Curtain," a flutter of orange fabric stretching across Colorado's Rifle Gap. He talks about the curtain as an amazing feat of engineering, but as he speaks his eloquence comes not from the words but from the feeling in them, the determination to describe a sight the likes of which he's never seen. He talks about the erection of the curtain as a democratic process, something you have to want to be part of, an accomplishment that needs something beyond attitude, something akin to faith. Asked if he was skeptical that the curtain was possible, he responds by asking how it's possible to be skeptical in a world where you have the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building. And then he stops, realizing those comparisons can't suffice, and he just says, "This is a vision."

And that, I think, is why Christo works in the public sphere. By taking his art, from planning to execution, out of the privacy of the studio and the cloistered museum, Christo is making art accessible to people in a way it may never have been for them. Ironically, the most succinct definition of what he does comes in "Christo in Paris" (the film about the Pont Neuf project), when one of Christo's detractors says that art is "a creation of the mind that transforms reality."

Next page | There's nothing natural about surrounding the islands of Biscayne Bay with hot pink fabric