United States: "What's the point of it?" a middle-aged lady in a fur coat asked Jim, a volunteer worker on "The Gates".
"There is no point," replied Jim, who took leave from his job as an accountant to join an army of 600 volunteers erecting 7,500 saffron-draped gates around Central Park."It's just something Christo and Jeanne-Claude wanted to do for themselves."
For four decades the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been staging public art around the world - from wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin to erecting hundreds of umbrellas in California and Japan.
Their latest exhibit "The Gates" was opened by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg on Saturday to ecstatic reviews from the media, and some typical New York wisecracks from among the thousands who came to see the $21 million exhibition.
"It's so wacky it works," said a man from Brooklyn who had climbed a rocky outcrop to get a panoramic view.
"What a waste of money, but I love it," said a woman from the upper west side as the sun caught the fabric and suffused it with an orange glow.
The steel portals were erected along 23 miles of paths with free-hanging saffron-coloured fabric. Stirred by a chilly breeze on Saturday they provided a billowing, meandering wave of orange against a bleak background of leafless trees and frozen ponds. To an observer with a Northern Ireland background it looked like a never-ending Orange Order parade on the 12th of July.
More than one million square feet of fabric was used by the artists who first conceived of the idea 26 years ago and financed the project themselves.
Many visitors remarked that they were impressed by the massive scale of the exhibition, which the artists said was designed to create a "golden ceiling creating warm shadows" throughout Central Park.
The materials were made in six US factories and included 5,290 tons of steel, the equivalent to two-thirds of the steel in the Eiffel Tower.
"I can't promise, particularly since this is New York, that everyone will love 'The Gates,' but I guarantee that they will all talk about it," Mr Bloomberg said.
True to their reputation for being taciturn, the artists refused to say themselves what the point of "The Gates" was. "It's very difficult," explained Christo. "You ask us to talk. This project is not involving talk. It's a real, physical space. You spend time, you experience the project."