I am a teacher and a human being. Students may be surprised to learn that this is true of most Yale faculty. From this unavoidably compromised position, I too am a little troubled by what I’ve heard about Aliza Shvarts’ art. [An art professor at Yale wrestles with the Aliza Shvarts controversy. He attempts to open with humor, but what he's written sounds pompous and illogical. Do Yale students think professors are gods? Robots? All teachers have always been people. Why is this a compromised position? Is he saying that as a person I find students who film themselves bleeding out repeated induced abortions in bathtubs and then mounting the images as a show a little troubling, while as a teacher I find it okay?]

Unfortunately, the University has banned her work from the Senior Project Show, making a first-hand encounter with Shvarts’ work impossible. [The writer's reference to the possibility of a 'first-hand encounter' demonstrates, in the third sentence of his essay, a fundamental misunderstanding of the work's character -- a character the artist has repeatedly and explicitly described. There is no reality to the piece. The work is a dynamic performance that includes everything she has thought, done, and not done in regard to it, plus what everyone else has thought, done, and not done in regard to it. It's remarkable to SOS that this professor has not at the very least put the phrase 'first-hand encounter,' with all of its nostalgic 'reality' metaphysics, in quotation marks.]

The University has decided not to allow the rest of us make up our own minds. I am considerably more troubled by their action than by hers. [Nurse Ratchet language -- I am considerably troubled -- jarringly wrong for a writer about to present himself as a wild free avant-gardist.]

The eminent philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto writes that since Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal as art in 1917, “the era of taste has been succeeded by the era of meaning.” In other words, it is no longer part of art’s job description to be beautiful or entertaining or to exhibit good taste. Instead, art has an obligation to say (or to ask) something. [Is Danto happy about the end of beauty and pleasure? Are we confident that this writer has represented Danto's argument fully? And even if he has -- he hasn't, of course -- note the hard work the writer's done to establish a definition and history of art. Today, unlike the old days when it was just a bunch of stupid glass bowls, art's got to say something man! Bugger beauty and delight. The only thing a thing needs to be anymore to be art is to say something. So like if Shvarts says to the deans at Yale that she didn't besperm herself and then desperm herself, that's art. She said something. And then again if she later says to the deans at Yale that she did besperm and then desperm herself, that's art.]

By this criterion, Shvarts’ work not only affirms its status as art but also fits comfortably into the arc of Western aesthetic tradition over the past century.

Years ago, when I was a student, my senior art-history seminar studied the work of Chris Burden, who has had himself shot in the arm with a rifle and crucified — bolts driven through his hands — on the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. A student asked the obligatory question: “It’s interesting, but is it art?” [ Silly dull obligatory student.] The answer given by the professor, Joan Brigham, remains one of the most valuable lessons I have ever learned: “It might as well be art,” she said, “it’s not anything else.” [What a valuable lesson. Though SOS wonders whether we couldn't derive different lessons from the professor's remark. Could it be that being an asshole in public is not even art? Is nothing, plus not art?]

This may sound flippant, but it points out a crucial distinction: Art isn’t politics or law or business or science. Art does not and should not dictate policy, legislation, profit, or fact. Although contemporary art aims for meaning, it doesn’t have any obligation to get it right. If there is still something essentially beautiful about art, it is that it is granted the freedom to engage problems without a responsibility to solve them. [It's arguable we don't have the right to ask even basic logic of our artists. But then artists must do their part and avoid attempting logic. Art is anything that shows us freely engaging in problems. What problem is Chris Burden engaging in when he crucifies himself on a VW? The logistical difficulties posed by subcompacts?]

Art is a “zone of free play” [Why the quotation marks?] in which the ideas, concerns, joys and sorrows of a community can be engaged in safety and without practical ramifications. [Art as Romper Room. And note the kitschy list: concerns, joys and sorrows...] Art is a form of societal role-playing, a testing of conceptions of identity and ideology undertaken in a buffered space. [What buffered space? Guy's a wimp. Shvarts has it right -- nothing buffered about it, baby. Art is nasty, subversive, out there.] In this sense, art tests societal mores [Societal mores. Gag me.] as drug trials test medications: prior to or separate from their availability and use in the real, legislated, world. [Art as drug trial. Inspiring.]

It is incumbent upon us, especially as members of a community of learners, to understand what art does and how it does it. [See how wild radical performance people like this guy write? But put aside the hyper-petit-bourgeois style and consider what he's saying. He first demonstrates aesthetic incomprehension, and then invites us to follow him into a classroom and find out what art is.] It is our intellectual imperative to insure that art not be confused with politics, law, business, or science. [Suddenly we're into the autonomy of art. Someone at Yale taught Shvarts that art was politics and politics was art.] Such confusion has ramifications: books have been burned, poets exiled, filmmakers blacklisted, painters jailed.

For art to speak to the interests of its time and place, it must first be allowed to speak. Disappointingly, Robert Storr, Dean of the School of Art, has issued a statement saying that an individual relinquishes the right to freedom of expression when that individual “evades full intellectual accountability for the strong response he or she may provoke.” What would constitute “full intellectual accountability”? [From this guy? Better you shouldn't ask.] Should Darwinians keep evolution to themselves because Christian fundamentalists are deeply offended? Should Flaubert have kept Madame Bovary under wraps? Would it have been preferable if 60 Minutes had passed on the Abu Ghraib story? This account of freedom of expression is, to all appearances, its opposite. [Confused. But then you get that way when you fail to give your central term -- art -- any meaning.]

Notwithstanding the faulty premise of “full intellectual accountability,” Shvarts has acquitted herself admirably in a guest column in this paper last Friday, April 18th:

“It remains ambiguous whether there was ever a fertilized ovum or not … This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies.”

Shvarts accepts the intellectual responsibility of art in general and of her own work in particular. [In what way is what she wrote here an acceptance of intellectual responsibility?] She has posed questions that have no easy answers. She has posed them not in the field of politics or law or business or science — where the complexity of the questions would have to be subdued in order to be adjudicated — but in a work of art. [Art as described here is the dumb person's complexity. Dumb people are attracted to the complexity of art because they cannot think. Art casts a magic spell of complexity but never asks anyone to actually try to understand the complexity. In fact if you tried to understand the complexity you'd be doing something tight-ass and reductive, like a scientist.]

Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College, has written that the Woodward Report, on the subject of “free expression, peaceful dissent, mutual respect and tolerance” at Yale, “affirms the special responsibility for a university community to uphold its members’ rights to ‘think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable,’ even in the face of words and acts that members find abhorrent.” For the University to ban Aliza Shvarts’ artwork, to deny the rest of us the opportunity to make up our own minds, is to abdicate this “special responsibility.” [Make up our own minds also should have had quotation marks around it, falsely suggesting as it does the closure of making up one's mind.]

The University should admit they have made a mistake and reinstate Shvarts’ artwork.

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