Last week the story broke that Yale senior Aliza Shvarts will be displaying her senior "art" project: a video of herself over a nine month period where she artificially inseminated herself, and then forced miscarriages with abortifacent pills.

Her project sparked a fierce debate (though she says she never meant to scandalize anyone), and Yale said that the entire thing was essentially a hoax: an elaborate performance art piece. The AP reported:

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The account swept across blogs and media outlets before Yale issued a statement saying it investigated and found it all to be a hoax that was Shvarts' idea of elaborate "performance art."

"The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body," said Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky.

However, Shvarts stood by her story claiming “No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen...because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Then, on Friday Shvarts wrote in the Yale Daily News an explanation:

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This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading.

This particular event brings together such a mess of issues that it's not surprising that at last night's Yale Politcal Union debate, which affirmed the resolution "Abortion Should Not Be Legal" with Amherst professor and ISI speaker Hadley Arkes, the focus was not on Abortion, but on Shvarts' project:

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In the course of the debate, a more local abortion issue sidetracked the students.

In their speeches, members of the audience barely responded to the resolution and instead focused on the art project of Aliza Shvarts...

“Any other week, I would start my speech with a thought experiment,” Liberal Party member David Broockman ’11 said in his speech for the negative. “Why is this week different from all other weeks?”

Broockman continued by voicing his opinions on Schvarts’ project — that it is not her supposed abortions that disappoint the left, but rather what he called her “sacrifice of dignity.”

Meanwhile, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this has sparked a discussion of academic freedom:

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Roger Kimball, a co-editor of The New Criterion, a magazine devoted to arts criticism, said the episode at Yale called into question the foundation of higher education, especially at the elite level. "What does a higher education mean, and what is going on in these privileged, expensive redoubts of educational endeavor?," he asked in a conversation with The Chronicle.

Today, news came that Shvarts' project will not be on display this morning, because of her silent refusal to admit that the entire project was a "creative fiction".

But I'm certain this isn't where the story ends. The questions of taste, morality, academic freedom, and accountablilty of the Universities, not to mention what constitutes Art, are to important to drop the issue now.

As one commentor said (be sure to read the comments, some of them, tough flippant, are quite to the point):

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I'm a Yale Professor. I give Shvartz an "A" for pretentious nonsense. I give her advisor an "F" for trying to teach her to be anything other than a clone of the advisor's silly posing. I give the Yale administration an "F" for running scared from the real story, which is the fact that students at Yale can fall into majors where they learn nothing other than the ability to parrot incomprehensible crap.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Margaret Perry,

Frist Things contributer Ian Alan Corbin has afollow-up in todays "On the Square":

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Ms. Shvarts is obviously an intelligent young woman, and she articulates her moral vision with vigor. And yet one is struck by how tired that vision is. Anyone who has been paying a modicum of attention to the warp and woof of postmodern thought will already have learned Ms. Shvarts’ manifesto by heart. One can hardly imagine a moral project more at home in the contemporary academy than that of Shvarts...
In the days following Shvarts’ press release, the opinion pages of the Yale paper were flooded with angry condemnations of Aliza Shvarts. And yet, with the exception of a few conservative, pro-life standbys, Shvarts’ critics seem unable to augment their outrage, shock, and disgust with a proportionately strong argument as to why Ms. Shvarts’ “art” is so very outrageous. One columnist, Anthony LeCounte, did express vague aesthetic disgust with Shvarts’ “art” but spent his column excoriating those who would censor Shvarts based on the immorality of her alleged actions. He closed his column by saying that indeed he found Shvart’s actions “abhorrent, but that’s just my aesthetics (not morality), which warrant no right to unfairly attack or attempt to silence Shvarts or any other similarly distasteful artist for offending my sensibilities.”

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