The art of provoking disgust
From The New York Times:
When an exhibition of art projects by Yale University seniors opened on Tuesday, one was missing: that of Aliza Shvarts, whose performance-art project reportedly involved artificially inseminating herself repeatedly and then self-aborting.
A description of the work last week in The Yale Daily News — which said it included videos of her miscarriages shown on a four-foot cube wrapped in plastic smeared with Vaseline and what Ms. Shvarts had described as her own blood — touched off a frenzy of horrified reaction.
But arts professors at universities around the country say they are no strangers to controversy. And they say that while freedom of expression is important in the academic world, so is providing guidance and setting limits.
“I’ve been through lots of very controversial student projects,” said Carol Becker, who recently left the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to become dean of Columbia’s School of the Arts. “Students, when they get caught in these situations, are usually unprepared for the consequences. They don’t know they are going to get this kind of reaction.”
Last week, Yale officials announced that Ms. Shvarts had admitted that her project, her senior thesis, was a fiction, and that she had neither inseminated herself nor self-aborted. But they said later that she had contradicted the denial. They said her project could not be shown unless she submitted an unambiguous written statement saying she did not inseminate herself or induce miscarriages.
On Tuesday, Gila Reinstein, a Yale spokeswoman, said Ms. Shvarts had not signed a statement. Ms. Shvarts has declined repeated requests for an interview.
