Is abortion artist Aliza Shvarts really crazy, or is her fancy Ivy League school simply trying to avert a major PR disaster by pretending she’s not? Yesterday, the Yale ’08 announced that for her senior art project, she got herself knocked up, induced a bunch of miscarriages via “herbal abortificients” (whatever those are), and then smeared the resulting blood/dead baby mixture over some cubes she planned on hanging from a gallery ceiling.
Oh, and there’s videotape!
After she was widely criticized in nearly ever blog and newspaper outlet in the country, Yale officials put out a press release claiming that Shvarts admitted to the school that she was actually a performance artist whose piece was nothing more than “a creative fiction.” Except then Shvarts told the Yale Daily News that the University’s statement was “ultimately inaccurate,” and that she really did use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself, and take herbs to make herself bleed into a cup, and videotape the whole thing. As for whether or not she was every technically carrying a child—the major point of controversy—well, she’s not really sure. “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,” she claims. Well, there is one person who should be able to say with 100-percent certainty what did or did not happen: Shvarts. Though that might be too logical a conclusion to draw from something so fundamentally half-baked.
Yale isn’t even the only institution that wishes the kooky artist never stepped foot on campus. The Buckley School, the elite Manhattan prep school at which Shvarts was valedictorian, expunged her from its website last night, according to a commenter on the Yale Daily News‘ story.
So who’s lying, Yale or Shvarts? It’s impossible to tell, but our money’s on Yale. We knew some fine art majors back in college, and they were just attention starved/loopy enough to actually do something like this. Yale’s statement also reads like a quintessential backpedal. We suppose we could find out by checking out the videotape, but we’d rather not. Seriously.