Yale Daily News

Svartz'z human body art has an ancestry :Ahab dousing newly forged harpoons in human blood from the crew of the Pequod to kill Moby Dick, circa 1841 ; Wolfsheim wearing human molar cufflinks in The Great Gatsby, circa 1928, ironically and grimly premonitory of the Holocaust by ten years; the Koran, transcribed with pens using the blood of Saddam Hussein while he was still in power circa 1990; even Yale's Peabody Museum offering a display in the 1950's which I saw with my own eyes: nine glass jars with a human fetus in each, one for each month of the nine month development.

Schvartz has pushed the buttons of rather hypocritical society I'd say.

headline is totally misleading, sirs.

I've seen similar exhibits of fetuses, and the fetuses were all natural miscarriages.

In the 1950s, abortion wasn't even legal yet.

Ahab and Wolfsheim are fictional, never "doused" or "wore" anything and were presented as deplorable, unhinged characters. Saddam Hussein was a homicidal lunatic, constantly and broadly condemned, eventually removed from power and executed by his own people. This is the man whose interactions with civilized society are supposed to demonstrate a "rather hypocritical society?" Sheesh. And a 1950's Peabody Museum biology display of fetuses almost certainly not aborted demonstrates exactly nothing about a creepy Yale undergraduate who claims to have deliberately created and destroyed several of her own young.

If there is hypocrisy here, it's that of the Tate - if any part of its decision to display Shvarts' work is supported by the fuss surrounding her talentless senior project. That kind of hypocrisy is sadly pretty common among art institutions of many stripes.

What has legal or illegal abortion got to do with human body art at the Peabody Museum? Broken record.

Can Aliza Shvarts not become a public figure? Please? At least not until she is famous.

Hopefully the YDN can call it a day now, and feel no further need to follow her every footsteps, all the while sprinkling every observation with a recollection back to end of her senior year.

Really, this is tabloid journalism at this point.

Look! Oprah's wearing a new gown!

File under "Not newsworthy."

A presentation by "leading thinkers and practitioners?"

Mein G-tt: leading thinker? Practitioner?

Sheesh.

So, Shvartz gets what she has craved--always craved: attention (and I am feeding her too).

One point: does anyone else find anything...odd about the first post... What are the odds that so soon after the update someone (and 70+ no less!) so morbidly PRO Shvarts would have happened to check the YDN (I, admittedly, happen to check it as part of my morning ritual web surf). Just something...odd.

Oh, one more thing: "Contacted last week, University officials — including Yale College Dean Peter Salovey — said they did not know about Shvarts' impending participation in the Tate event."

Dear YDN: And why the freak WOULD they?! She's a G-R-A-D-U-A-T-E (ostensibly), so...why would Yale be monitoring her activities?

Another DUH moment for YDN.

No doubt the Tate and Kim-Cohen would have arranged for a far larger role in this upcoming "unmissable opportunity" if Shvarts' senior project had consisted of her late term, self-fertilized, aborted fetus pickled in formaldahyde - in the style of the Peabody Museum and Tate favorite Damien Hirst. Or at least she had CLAIMED that's what it was. Maybe she'll do that at the Tate. Talk about an "unmissable opportunity!" The world and the British taxpayers who pay for the Tate's shenanigans can only sit with baited breath until the unmissable holy day! Buty who pays for Kim-Cohen?

Of course Ahab and Wolfsheim are fictional. As far as I can tell, so is Shvarts's art.

I was a child at my mother's hand when I was both horrified and fascinated by the Peabody display: sorry to disappoint the "ageist" 70 commentator. I suppose Picasso, Nevelsson and Bourgeois in their 90's would have registered on that blogger's irrelevant scale.

As for commenting "so soon"--I receive the YDN automated e-dition. I have no control over when it arrives on my computer. Sorry to disappoint again, my dear Watson---my dear Hieronymous.

Yes. Saddam Hussein was a homicidal maniac. So too Ahab. And perhaps Shvarts's art is a mirror to a society which worships statistics and is blind to one: 36 million medically terminated pregnancies since Roe.

Any fool knows that abortion is used as a form of Moday-morning birth control by a society which long ago sold its soul to the gods of hedonism and materialism. At least be that introspectively honest about it.

And sin of sins: Ms Schvarts the artist "wants attention". The only artist I know who didn't want attention was Emily Dickinson----and her introversion was as "morbid" as one blogger asserts my interest in this topic to be.

"We could never determine unambiguously what she did," Salovey said.

I don't remember such nuance and indecision on Salovey's part 2 months ago when he seemed absolutely certain of everything he was saying.