This was linked to on Slate. I honestly don't get it. I read her comments and think, these are the thoughts of a naive and presumptious child. And her art doesn't really make those points. For example, one of her statements was "it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are .meant. to birth a child." and later "These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability" How the heck does this prove that? Also, what other purpose does a uterus have? Also, she claims it is only a miscarriage because we call it that. It is a miscarriage if the egg was fertilized. Just because she didn't take a pregnancy test and find out if it was a miscarriage or a period, doesn't mean the word is ambiguous- just that her situation is.
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Not to mention it may or may not have been a fake in the first place.
Either way, it was a pretty dumb idea. Except here we all are talking about it (it's been on several of my blogs), so maybe she was right about the attention-grabbing-ness of it.
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quote: I read her comments and think, these are the thoughts of a naive and presumptuous child.
I agree. Rather than being the great thoughtful exploration she sees this as, she's trivializing the creation of life and the moral complexities surrounding the abortion debate. Even ardent proponents of abortion don't see it as a "good" thing, just the better of two evils. To attempt to create life for the sole purpose of destroying it is evil.
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But even being fake, what is the point behind it? My senior thesis actually required me to think and I thought that was generally the standard- not can you come up with a project that attracts attention. Now, I just went to a measly state school, so maybe the expectations are different at Yale. All I see in this is as Samprimary says attention whoring. Where is the deep thinking, the maturity, the proof that the last 4 years haven't been a complete waste of yoru profs time?
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quote:Even ardent proponents of abortion don't see it as a "good" thing, just the better of two evils.
This isn't technically true. I know quite a few pro-choicers who attach no moral judgment whatsoever to an abortion.
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"Two evils"...that gets me thinking. I've mentioned this before, but why does the abortion debate almost always exclude adoption as a choice? Both sides seem most often to act as if it just doesn't exist.
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Well, you have to understand that adoption isn't a simple matter either. Yes, adoption is an option, but it also has its own share of pain and loss that gets overlooked. Plus, the pro-life side sometimes tends to push adoption in an unhealthy way. Coersion. Convincing a single mother that her child would be better off with a couple BECAUSE they are a couple sees as wrong and unhealthy as abortion can be. It's a complicated situation and both sides simplify it way too much.
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quote:Now, I just went to a measly state school, so maybe the expectations are different at Yale.
I'm not sure I understand the reference to Yale. What do they have to do with the expectations here?
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The student did the project for her senior thesis at Yale. So, in theory, there was a responsible faculty member who was supervising this whole thing.
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Yale published the press release saying that she did not actually impregnante herself. I believe Davenport college refers to a grouping at the school.
edit- looks like you edited already. Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
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The artist disputes Yale's press release that it's fake. I would say indeterminate is a better term, or ambiguous. It's certainly shocking. And it minimalizes the real heartbreak of woman who endure miscarriages. Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote:Even ardent proponents of abortion don't see it as a "good" thing, just the better of two evils.
This isn't technically true. I know quite a few pro-choicers who attach no moral judgment whatsoever to an abortion.
I think we can treat it as a spectrum of beliefs. I personally attach very little moral judgment to abortion, other than that I think that unwanted pregnancy is an issue that should be better addressed before people get pregnant. I believe that the truly immoral act is for our society to have so many remedies for this problem of unwanted pregnancy, and refuse to properly use them.
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Syn, you consider convincing to automatically equal coercing, you somehow -know- that the mothers put up their child for adoption because of unhealthy reasons they brainwashed into, and -thats- why you feel it's better neither side brings it up at all?
I have to disagree.
I'll admit I'm biased. I've personally known more than one couple who weren't able to have children of their own who were helped by adoption. I don't pretend it's an easy choice, but it is another choice.
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quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: Syn, you consider convincing to automatically equal coercing, you somehow -know- that the mothers put up their child for adoption because of unhealthy reasons they brainwashed into, and -thats- why you feel it's better neither side brings it up at all?
I have to disagree.
I'll admit I'm biased. I've personally known more than one couple who weren't able to have children of their own who were helped by adoption. I don't pretend it's an easy choice, but it is another choice.
Did I say that? I did not. I said that it's a more complicated situation then both sides realize. ARG! I hate it when people put words into my fingers. It urks me deeply. In some cases there could be coersion, and when there is it's wrong. It's not right to put pressure on a potential birth mother because it could intensify her pain in the future. I'm not saying that adoption should not be bought up as a choice, it's COMPLICATED. A woman shouldn't be pressured into adoption JUST because she's single or JUST because she's young because it's HER decision. Like I said, it's complicated. And I really, really hate the phrase "children of their own" so much. You adopt a child and they are every bit as much of your own as a child born biologically. The fact is that a great deal of folks do not understand just how complicated adoption can be on all sides, just as abortion is a complicated issue. Plus, it gets brought up by pro-life folks more often then you think. Take the baby-scoop era for example. There are still people suffering as a result of that. What has to happen when it comes to complicated human matters is realizing that it's like surgery. Delicate, intricate, there are on shortcuts, no simple solutions. There are still many women suffering from the pain of closed adoptions, and their birth children suffer too, or couples who still have the pain of not having a biological child to deal with,a nd sometimes it is taken out on the adopted child. Does this happen all the time? No. In many cases a woman can make an adoption plan, feel grief, but still live a complete and whole life despite it, and children can grow up in a loving home with little regret, but it's not always like that, and that has to be acknowledged, just like the role in detailed sex education in preventing abortions. I am against over-simplifying.
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Hmm I think this girl really hasn't even learned proper anatomical functions. The ovaries function is to provide eggs, the uterus functions to grow a fertilized egg into a baby. That is their function. Many women have them removed at some point in their lives and there bodies function properly without them.
Her article was hard to follow and really had no substance. I would think a senior thesis would require much more research.
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It isn't a senior thesis. She's an art major, and the column linked was a column in the school newspaper responding to controversy about her senior art project.
quote:The display of Schvarts’ project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts’ self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.
Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.
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At one point they said that the press releases and interviews were an important part of the piece as well. Since those are part of it, they should come off as something other then a string of buzzwords.
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That depends on the intent of the piece. It's performance art -- perhaps it's part of the performance to come across as a pretentious twit.
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You know, I think this is the extreme example of what happens when you try too hard to be creative. Or, to be more accurate, trying too hard to make a statement with art, rather than letting your art speak for itself.
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I think the school might want to get her checked out by a friendly local psychiatrist. Because whether or not the abortions are fake, or art, or whatever, smearing blood around in public isn't usually a sign of good mental health. This is not even normal by art school standards. I'd say they need to make sure they fulfil their duty of care.
Because what's she going to do next - film her suicide attempts?
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quote:For example, one of her statements was "it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are .meant. to birth a child." and later "These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability" How the heck does this prove that? Also, what other purpose does a uterus have?
In this case her uterus served the purpose, allegedly, of producing art. Whether or not it actually did is immaterial, because it could have.
I'd argue that the function of ovaries or uteri (or testicles) is to reproduce in much the same way that the function of guns is to kill. Yes, they were designed ("designed" in the case of reproductive organs) to serve their function, but that doesn't mean they can't be used to other ends. Guns can be used for sport. Sometimes, reproductive organs can too.
I promise that link is safe. Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. --Alexander Pope
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I had wondered how including actual blood in the display was going to relate to the school's bio-hazard policies. Most public places I know have procedures in place to deal with an injury that involves blood (or other bodily fluids) and keeping it around in an unsealed format is not generally part of those procedures.
Also, I would think it would stink.
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My eyes don't roll nearly far enough. What utter claptrap. Aside from misstating the facts (the piece was not banned; the school is simply insisting on a signed statement first), who actually says such nonsense as “It might as well be art, it’s not anything else" and "it is no longer part of art’s job description to be beautiful or entertaining or to exhibit good taste"?
I remember now why I rarely read college papers.
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If you have to write an essay explaining it, and the work itself is useless in itself, it isn't art. It's an excuse to write a bad paper.
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I would really love to know when art became less about beauty and more about how you could piss people off, or shock them.
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Alexander Pope died in 1744, so I suspect that that's been around longer than we think.
Having said that, I don't think that even now art that serves only to shock lasts. They might make the occasional history book, but they don't last in the way that real art can.
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Come on, we're all talking about it. How often can you say that about what's normally featured in art exhibits?
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We also talked for several pages about the kids who cheated using facebook. Ethical violations are often discussed, it doesn't make them art. I think artists are one of the few professions that seem to reject any sort of ethical standards. (I am not saying that artists lack ethics, but the profession doesn't seem to have them).
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: We also talked for several pages about the kids who cheated using facebook. Ethical violations are often discussed, it doesn't make them art.
Whose to say what's art and what's not. If she had these miscarriages within the same period that a woman can get a legal abortion, has any wrong truly been done here? Let's say she did something almost as disgusting for the project--say, smearing a large white surface with her menstrual blood or something. Would we be questioning whether or not that was art? Would it be news? The only people this news story should be shocking are the anti-choice crowd.
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It would still be a biohazard. And not art. bleh.
And lets be clear. The evidence points to her having made the whole thing up. There are so many holes in her story you could drive a fleet of trucks through.
Isn't she a little bit old to be making up stories for attention? Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Originally posted by rivka: It would still be a biohazard. And not art. bleh.
And lets be clear. The evidence points to her having made the whole thing up. There are so many holes in her story you could drive a fleet of trucks through.
Isn't she a little bit old to be making up stories for attention?
I know it was a bizarre example but there are precedents for stuff like that.
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