Aliza Shvarts and All that Art Stuff

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In two recent cases out of thousands, the radical left-wing agenda in the so-called ‘arts’ has come into full view. At Yale University a female student artificially inseminated herself and then took drugs to induce miscarriages. This is not a joke. This is called ‘performance art’, for those who may not know.

In Maine, another student placed American flags on the campus-center floor to see if students would walk on them. For those who may not know, this is called ‘installation art’.

These two examples show the degree to which anger, nihilism and anti-Americanism have thoroughly permeated the arts under the tutelage of leftist professors and a belief system that is not at all about art, but about undermining art in the name of cultural disruption.

In the Yale case, Aliza Shvarts smeared her blood from the miscarriages on plastic sheeting for her ‘exhibit’ which will include video of Shvarts’ miscarriages filmed. And while the whole project actually has been revealed as a hoax, that is not the point. The point is that this female would even conceive of a hoax like this in an ‘art’ school. It is a disturbing commentary.

The ‘artwork’ had drawn expectedly negative reactions from many opposed to abortion, and even from abortion-rights advocates. National Right to Life Committee president Wanda Franz said, “It’s clearly depraved… She’s a serial killer. This is just a horrible thought.” Even NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion-rights group said, “This project is offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage.”

Typically Shvarts had claimed that her ‘artwork’ was intended to stimulate discussion about the connection between the human body and art, which is typical of the low-rent, banal, politically-calculated rationales coming out of the contemporary arts today. And Shvarts probably now will move to New York City, be embraced by the no-talent feminists who control much of the art world there, and become rich and famous.

In Maine, Susan Crane of the University of Maine in Farmington put hundreds of flags on the floor of the student union in a pattern that would require students to actively walk around them to avoid stepping on them. Crane said that about 5% of students walked on the flags.

Many protested the project including Vietnam War veteran Charles Bennett who said, “As far as I was concerned, that was desecration of the American flag.”

Of her project, Crane said, “it sparked conversation and thought about how we feel about our flag, which I think is very important. It was a very hard thing to do, to put the flag on the floor.”

Crane received permission from the university to display the project which was done in conjunction with a class called The Cultural Relationship of Art and the Personal Politic.

Celeste Branham, vice president of student and community services said, “Particularly in a time when there’s a lot of controversy about our involvement in Iraq, we expected that passions would be heightened, and we are not at all surprised by the reaction.”

Branham continued: “We were supporting, and would continue to support any student’s First Amendment right to free expression under the law.”
 
These are not isolated cases. And obviously there is a pattern in the so-called ‘arts’ today, not of free expression, but of encouraged and coerced expression. Radical ideologue professors are provoking students to make not art but political tableaux that reflect contempt for our society. The millennia-long connection between art and beauty and transcendence has been replaced by a fixation with narcissism and baiting. This art is made by people who are not even artists. And that is exactly the point.

Had the Maine student placed pictures of Martin Luther King on the floor, she would have been appropriately savaged. Her choice of subject matter in the flags was carefully calculated to please the professoriate and their agenda.

If she had installed proper displays of generations of American flags on the wall for students to observe the evolving notion of our national symbol, it would have been deemed sentimental by the free-expression culture on our university campuses. Despite the fact that it would have been her free expression.

Had the Yale student expressed a pro-life agenda, perhaps by conceiving and giving birth to a child as an indicator of the joy of life (what an art project that would have been…) her ‘art’ would have been demeaned as nothing more than a paean to a bygone era when women were forced to stay home with their children.

No, in today’s ‘arts’, any tendencies toward beauty, or even toward anything positive like patriotism or life, are discouraged. According to the secularist leftists who have commandeered the arts, art no longer has any association with the mastery of form, color and line because that would require years of study and discipline for which they carry no brief and of which they are incapable. Instead the arts are yet another major cultural institution that has been taken over for the sole purpose of political expression by any means necessary.

This story has been evolving for 160 years since the publication in 1848 of the Communist Manifesto, the discredited foray into collective economics. In that document Karl Marx questioned the entire premise of the natural system of capitalist economics as it had been practiced throughout the ages. Marx said that capitalism had failed to achieve equity for mankind. Yet when Marx’s own principles have been applied, the results have been utterly catastrophic, infinitely worse than anything previously endured under capitalism.

In the same era as Marx, certain artists decided that the same reactionary principles needed to be applied to art: Out with the tried and true, and in with the revolution. Art, however, does not have a directly measurable effect on citizens’ lives. People know when they are suffering from lack of food or shelter as they always do under communism/marxism. But when art becomes an empty banquet, when a painting has no meaning or intellectual nourishment, viewers can be convinced by words alone, uttered by complicit critics, collectors and curators, that what they are seeing is a genuine and expressive cornucopia, just as public sloganeering attempts to assure the deprived masses under communism that all is well.

And that is precisely what has happened to the arts since the mid-19th century when the Communist Manifesto started to disseminate its distortions throughout society, and its anti-establishment message was swallowed whole by the most radical elements in the art world.

With the rejection of the beauty that they were incapable of producing (envy is the most intense emotion), certain lesser artists began to rise in stature and to legitimize intentionally ugly and puerile art pioneered by the angry and openly-communist Pablo Picasso. Art was turned upside down, just as economies have been turned upside down by the theories of Marx.
But this false art is nothing more than what it is — an assault on quality and meaning, just as our universities have replaced real wisdom with faux-history, phony theories like ‘global warming’, and biased opinion.

In an essay by Arthur Krystal entitled “Hello, Beautiful”, the author considers the nature of beauty. In describing the way in which the 20th century artistic avant-garde rejected beauty, Krystal says: “Disillusioned by the futility and senseless carnage of the First World War, the first generation of the avant-garde rejected whatever moral values had made such a war possible, and abandoned the ideal of a metaphysic underlying artistic production. Genius was necessary, and a cold eye; but beauty and goodness – no. What did such foolishness have to do with reality or aesthetics? Artists, who were the interpreters of life, saw no reason to make art enjoyable or pleasant; their character was to make it unique and interesting. Interesting was as good as it got.”

In his excellent essay, Krystal is only concerned about beauty, and never mentions the duality of art, that art is treasured, memorable and rich, but alternately powerless. In other words, real artists may make things of beauty, but they don’t change the course of history. In fact some great art projects, like Leonardo’s massive bronze equestrian casting in honor of Francesco Sforza, have been canceled by conflict.

And how many conflicts have been canceled by art?

None, friends. None.

So while the avant-garde artists decided to reject the “moral values” of the social structure – including the beauty that had dominated art – that had led to World War I, it was a highly selective rejection. They could have put down their brushes and sought to eliminate poverty or cultural inequities instead, two of the root causes of war. But they did not because they were merely intellectuals, and bogus ones at that. They took the easy route, selected out beauty and replaced it with malice so that in deed anyone could call himself or herself an artist. And this was a direct attack on the heavenly nature of art, as well as an attack on the social order itself.

Fortunately for us all, the mask is off. Despite their best efforts, beauty still reigns supreme in our collective DNA, even among the leftists who control the arts today. They may reject beauty in the paintings they buy, but at the same time those rich liberals in Hollywood want ‘beautiful people’ in the movies on which their livelihoods depend. And they seek out the ultimate designers in the cars they buy, the handsome Porsches and sublime Ferraris. And they insist on trophy spouses and gorgeous children. And lovely teeth, hairstyles and bodies. And elegant well-designed, well-kept homes.  

Beauty still rules. It may be on intellectual hiatus among the hoi-pooloi, but finally, it always is with us.

Why would environmentalists seek to passionately protect a mountain or a forest?

For its innate beauty, that is why.

Yet their brethren in the arts reject beauty and replace it with bombast, spite and ugliness like the bombast of induced abortions and flags strewn across the floor. Indeed these are themselves the types of provocations that lead to chaos and war.

“Beauty is the highest morality,” said Frank Lloyd Wright. That is why our society has treasured its most beautiful buildings, sculptures, monuments and paintings as a sign of progress. Ugliness is an indicator of social decline and cultural collapse, and once a society embraces the ugly over the beautiful, there is a virus loose in the house, and we are all in danger. And that is why the contemporary arts are yet another gauge of our cumulative societal malaise that is manifest in moral relativism, profanity, promiscuous sex, know-nothing universities, and a rejection of the high ideals of our nation’s founders.

The traditional talisman of beauty in paintings and sculptures have lifted our hearts and minds since time immemorial, indicating the high-water marks of history. If we fail to strive toward those marks, we never will be able to embrace our glory, our social stability and our promise for the future.

Also see:

• Michelle Malkin: September 11th Fund Underwrote Crazy Yalie’s “Heteronormative” Rant
• Walking on the American Flag is ‘Art’?!