Arts, Shvarts!

Aliza Shvarts, you have your 15 minutes of fame. I hope it lasts a lot a longer. I sympathize with those who think we should stop talking about you and send you back into permanent obscurity by the quickest route, but I would rather see you immortalized.

Your goals at this point are probably achieved. You proved yourself a first-class provocateur. Some faculty at Yale must have taught you that an artist and a provocateur are the same thing, that an artist’s job is to stir controversy, to make us think, right? Well, you sparked a national conversation. It isn’t the conversation you said you wanted about women’s issues or the ambiguity of your body or whatever. It’s a conversation primarily about you. And that’s really what this is all about, isn’t it?

Let’s keep the conversation going just a while longer.

Some will take you to task on the utter depravity of your project. (Even as a hoax, that criticism still holds.) But you actually unified both sides of the abortion debate. Now that’s quite an achievement! So what if they’re unified in condemning you? You helped us all find common ground, and for that you should be rewarded.

Others will blame Yale for teaching you such sophomoric ideas about art. It’s hard to argue with that, but Yale is teaching the same prevalent philosophy that you find in most universities. You articulated it well: “Art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity.” Art has always been a potent political tool, so why not make it just political and yoke it to the fight against heteronormativity?

It’s not your fault that Yale forgot to teach aesthetics. (Aesthetics, Aliza, is the former method of judging art based on notions of beauty, but it has been thoroughly discredited.) In the secular, post-modern world, there is nothing higher than our contemplative intellect, nothing greater than ourselves, so provoking thought is clearly the most art can do.

Besides, it’s so liberating and self-affirming to say something outrageous, watch the conservatives go berserk, and prove that they have no regard for art or the First Amendment. Academia will circle the wagons.

Robert M. O’Neil, a free-speech expert at the University of Virginia, agreed that displaying the Yale student’s artwork is about freedom of expression. “Art departments have always been and must remain shelters for creativity which sometimes offends and often challenges,” said Mr. O’Neil, director of the university’s Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. But he also acknowledged that such a message “doesn’t usually go down terribly well with people in the outside world.”

No, I commend you for learning all that Yale taught you, and learning it very well indeed. All of academia can be proud, even if the outside world isn’t. You are their progeny, their hope, their little chicken come home to roost. Your faculty approved this project, didn’t they? If they had some qualms about it, surely those brave souls would have said so.

Simply put, Aliza, your little project achieves near perfection, cobbling together all the modern ideals (provocation, politicization, your bodily functions, gender consciousness, profanity and degradation) while avoiding the pitfalls of the past (beauty, coherence, aspiration, transcendence). It deserves an A++.

For creating art that perfectly embodies these ideals, I propose that such art from henceforth bear you name. Shvarts!

When we go to the Erfurt Opera and see Verdi staged at Ground Zero with naked cast, we should all nod knowingly and say, “Now that’s Shvarts.”

When we see a film at the San Francisco Art Institute of animals beaten over the head with sledge hammers, we can think about the artist’s all-important message and know that we have had a true Shvartistic experience.

When they trample Old Glory at the University of Maine, or a student defecates in public, we can commend the Shvarts Department for preserving a “shelter of creativity” and free expression.

We can even send our daughters to study Liberal Shvarts at Randolph College, knowing that the college’s idea of broadening horizons includes a field trip to the bordello. (The bordello used to be part of the “outside world,” but it has been brought into the university as the laboratory of Women’s Studies.)

“Shvarts” can stand for all projects like yours, Aliza, so overloaded with politics and ideology that the art gets squeezed out entirely. It will mean, quite literally in your case, the miscarriage of art.

Clarity is your gift to us all, and for that I hope your name will forever remind us that when you remove goodness and beauty from the Arts, you are left merely with Shvarts.