By Luiz Coehlo
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a still-growing online petition calling for Costa Rican artist Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas not to be included in this year’s Bienal Centroamericana Honduras. The alleged reason was a stray dog, named Natividad, which was held captive in a gallery without food or water as part of one of the artist’s exhibition. Nobody really knows if the aforementioned act happened, but just the gossip about it has generated a public comotion.
Now, the whole world has been shocked by the story of a Yale student’s senior art project. Aliza Shvarts intended to display a “documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself as often as possible while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages.” as the
Yale Daily News first reported. The exhibit would also feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages and samples of the blood collected from the process. The reason for such a project? She said: “I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity. I think that I’m creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.”
Or not. Waves of protest have reached Yale from all parts of the country (and all over the world too). Shvarts’ project was not shown, to the wider public, and she finally submitted another piece in lieu of her controversial one. Yale officials claimed the project was merely a dramatization, and that she did not do
the things she said she did in constructing the exhibition, according to a strongly worded statement issued by the Ivy League school. Aliza, however, kept claiming her project was real, and that the University officials had misunderstood her words.
Whether or not all those stories were true, the gossip around them raises several concerns — to artists, art schools and art per se. Sadly, it’s clear that the general public isn’t surprised anymore when someone claims to have created an “art project” that, otherwise, would be considered a crime.
Art has become some sort of a scapegoat to the most bizarre ideas (including spreading hoaxes). It’s getting to the point that, even when they are not legitimate, just the label “art exhibit” is enough to fool people. What is the future of art? Who knows?
