ruah arts group

Michael J. Lewis, a professor of art at Williams’ College, weighs in on the Schvarts Abortion Art debate.

HT to Matthew Milliner.

(Proceed with caution: mature and potentially disturbing subject matter.) 

Lucas Kwong wonders if his alma mater, Yale, is going to hell in a hand-basket. Why does he wonder that, you may ask? Because of the recent artistic exploits in the moral morass that is ivy league “higher” education. He elucidates,

By now, I’m sure, most citizens of the blogosphere are familiar with the escapades of Aliza Shvarts, abortion artist extraordinaire. Over the course of nine months, Shvarts allegedly inseminated herself nine times with sperm obtained from anonymous donors, only to ingest abortive pills two weeks after each insemination. Shvarts now intends to display videos of her self-induced miscarriages, as well as an installation of her own blood, on campus. While the university insists that her story amounts to a “creative fiction project,” I suspect that Aliza’s exhibit is nothing less than an example of art imitating life—not in terms of its content, but in terms of its philosophical underpinnings.

He goes on to say that this terrible foray into artistic madness might be good in the sense that it will reveal a lot of modern and contemporary art–particularly that which emerges from the Babylonian ivory towers of higher ed–for what it is: creative nihilism, for which the logical end is death. Aliza Shvarts, aside from the wretchedness of her actions (true or hoax), has aborted art, and thus has smote goodness and true, and blotted out beauty.

These are signs of the times, an apophatic approach to art that may, in the end (which is the beginning), redeem time and beauty.

+++++++++++++

Matthew Milliner, art historian of faith, give his two cents here.