It was never my intention to give the girl or her supporters a solitary keystroke. I have my own daughter over whom to worry and believed Aliza Shvarts’ parents would assist in sorting her out. However, as her story has refluxed in recent days, I am compelled to impart something. Hopefully, given the passing of time, she has matured somewhat and will continue to learn that there is much to the condition of man which exceeds the outlines penned in the sterile environment of the university classroom. I do not suggest academia is always sterile. Kent State was not sterile. Campus clock towers have proven virulent. Virginia Tech is stained. Academia at its best, for those who choose the path of formal education, provides the eye opener, the catalyst, the spark of discovery that directs a mind toward its calling. Exploiting or procuring one’s own blood loss as “art” is not a calling.

The fracas over Aliza Shvarts and her senior art project at Yale University is more disturbing when considered in light of blood loss the world over. We are aware of blood loss on college campuses. We are aware of the blood loss of war. We are aware of the blood loss of women. The Ivy League art student intended to smear the “ambiguous” bloody content of her womb upon plastic, wrap it around a wooden cube, suspend the cube from a ceiling and then project video of her alleged self-induced bathtub abortions thereon. She claimed to have artificially inseminated herself multiple times over nine months. Aliza claimed her intended demonstration was a strong and fitting statement against the “patriarchal heteronormative.” That it would have lived “up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.” Yale officials claim that the project in actuality was the public’s response to the “fiction” created by Aliza and insisted she sign a statement accordingly. Aliza has persisted otherwise. That she was possibly encouraged in her mental chaos by one of her instructors or counselors is reprehensible. Appropriate demonstrations against the patriarchal heteronormative (term coined 1991) are made by women each day who with great strength live their lives as they choose as well as by men who do the same – and who do so without smearing their own body waste on plastic for the public to view.

Inasmuch as any “purpose” of art is concerned, artists are moved in different ways and through different mediums. Is art best when selfishly or selflessly motivated? Is its purpose to purge the soul of its creator or to conjure a soul purge in those who look thereon or both? Is its purpose singular or collective? Regardless of the answers there is no value, artistic or otherwise, in the smearing of menses or aborted fetal tissue onto any surface for public viewing. Sharvts’ concept had nothing to do with any cause other than the furthering of her own immature (and possibly encouraged) hubris. Granted, she may have been somewhat lulled into thinking her idea was appropriate by community standards given some of the sick video readily available on YouTube. Self-mutilation and excreta consumption have been regularly posted on that service – perhaps under the guise of “art.” Shvarts had video posted there but it has since been removed.

The quotidian blood spill of women around the globe has inspired and continues to inspire many artists. Domestic violence and sexual assaults cause blood spill in women by the tens of thousands in America alone. The women of Juarez continue to have their blood spilled by the hundreds, sexually accosted, mutilated and left dead. The blood spill of the women and girls of the Congo continues, victims of rape and mutilation as weapons of war, often their injuries leave them unable to bear children. Great numbers of them still children, mourn children they will never have. The eleven year old girl denied an abortion in Romania after having been raped and her fourteen year old peer in Poland. Severe postpartum depression often leads to tragedy for both mother and infant.

There is no imposition of moral outrage or shouldering of the world’s injustice upon artists intended herein. However, if you claim as an artist to create for a specific purpose in furtherance of a specific cause, it is paramount you do so within a global context considering all for whom you claim to speak – therein lies the selflessness. Do so in a medium which does not minimize tragedy. Do so respectfully. Most importantly, do so with a complete understanding of the concept which has motivated your work. There are enough reasons, legitimate and otherwise, over which blood is lost. Spilling your own, smearing it on plastic and calling it “art” has no place among them. Ms. Shvarts’ trivialization and abuse of that part of her body which she holds in commonality with so many who suffer was selfish and irresponsible and furthered no cause other than her own. The real offense is that no doubt had the display come to fruition, there would have been no shortage of willing viewers and ultimately an offer to purchase.