In New York City's Central Park, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates" are currently transforming 23 miles of the park's winding footpaths with 7,500 16-foot-high reddish-orange uprights, from whose vinyl crossbars hang a delicate, reddish-orange nylon cloth, carefully devised to end a few feet above the tallest possible human's head. For 24 years, the Bulgarian-born Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, had been trying to pry from New York officials permission to install "The Gates." Distracting practical, no-nonsense people with proposals of pure, useless fancy has always been part of the pair's Dada-ish projects: Throughout the early '90s, the two had German politicians debating their proposal to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin with fabric. Bending the world to whimsy is their aesthetic.