A $1200 Cardboard Tube

The dissemination of Gates-related memorabilia on EBay has begun:

Sometimes a cardboard tube is just a cardboard tube. But sometimes, as a New York teenager discovered this week, a cardboard tube might be an objet d’art worth $1,200 – to the right buyer.

Last Saturday, Dane Kolomatsky, 15, accompanied his mother and a friend of hers to Central Park to view “The Gates,” the public artwork created by Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, and composed of 7,500 saffron-colored nylon curtains hanging from rectangular frames along the pathways of the park.

Walking by the Loeb Boathouse near 72nd Street, Dane said, he saw a pile of cardboard tubes on the ground. The tubes had served to spool the curtains at the top of the gates. With the curtains unfurled, the tubes were destined to be transported out of the park and recycled.

“I picked out the smallest one, which was seven feet long, and I asked a volunteer if I could have it,” Dane said. “And he said, ‘Yes, but only one.’ ”

It was not until he decided to sell the cardboard tube on eBay, the popular auction Web site, that Mr. Kolomatsky become embroiled in an impassioned debate over New York’s latest artistic extravaganza.

The tube is one of many pieces of Gates detritus to show up on EBay. Other examples include, somewhat ominously, one of the bolts used to hold the gates together.

In the end, the tube owner decided to retain the keepsake.