Halls of ivy and blood

UPDATE: The following story is a hoax, or sort of.

Yale Daily News - For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse:

Art major Aliza Shvarts ’08 wants to make a statement.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock — saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for “shock value.”

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

Read it all... if you have the stomach.

On the list where this story came to my attention, someone responding writes:

This piece truly is a work of art, and the artist exceptional. Art, at its essence, is simply a refection of the world it is born into. It describes the zeitgeist. That this truly is authentic art speaks volumes about us … and is very sad.

But isn't this the incomplete understanding of art that allows this sad act to occur in the first place? I mean, what is the difference between representing our violence or callousness towards the stuff and means of life, and "performing" it? In asking the question, have I just fallen into this "work" of "art"? or is it just politics that I've engaged? I think art is inherently political, even when not directly so (since even the contemplation of beauty or nature cannot be divorced from a developing human self-understanding on the political scene) but not all politics is art.