Whatever Michael Bloomberg's virtues as mayor, he is not a poetic or impassioned personality on the order of, say, John Lindsay or Ed Koch. He's a businessman who rarely consents to anything that doesn't come down on the positive side of a cost-benefit analysis. Bloomberg decreed that the city would make a fortune from all the tourists who, he was certain, would flock to New York to see "The Gates," and the project's critics backed down. When I went to see "The Gates," the crowds were so thick and impatient that I couldn't wait to leave the park. An art student traveling to Paris in 1985 to paint the Pont Neuf would have experienced the same exasperation. This is why critics of the duo, wearied by the self-perpetuating media clamor surrounding the giant installation are, in effect, asking whether the pair's projects are oppressive triumphs of the will or joyous triumphs of the imagination? Yet another kind of headache or a new kind of balm?