If one were to consult the Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2006), one would find this definition:
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
2. the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection.
Etc. You get the idea.
And by these definitions alone, Yale senior Aliza Shvarts’ project fits the bill. Perhaps you’ve heard about it:
“Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, 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. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.”
Shvarts claims her “exhibition” was not designed to “shock” or “scandalize” the viewing public.
Another recent art project that nominally fits the bill:
First, Costa Rican artist Guillermo Habacuc Vargas paid children to catch a starving stray dog, which he named Natividad (birth); then, he chained the dog up in the middle of his exhibit in a gallery in Managua, Nicaragua, and refrained from feeding him or giving him any water. The dog died.
Vargas has been asked to represent his country at the Bienal Centroamericana in Honduras this year.
Call me a right-wing fascist but I don’t think killing fetuses and/or dogs qualifies as art in the broader theoretical sense … even though the works indubitably pass the Random House sniff test.
So where’s the line?
Well, I don’t particularly like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) – but I would argue that it is a work of art. At the very least, it explores and exploits the boundary between the sacred and the profane … a boundary, gaping black hole and tiny line that artists have been approaching, jumping across and shying away from for millennia.
Ditto for Damien Hirst, who has been working with dead and living animals and insects (I consider Hirst’s art-related insecticide to be one of the more enjoyable and beneficial aspects of his work) since 1988, when he curated the “Freeze” exhibit while he was a student at Goldsmiths College. I personally find his life-sized platinum skull – “For the Love of God” – encrusted with 8,601 fine diamonds to be totally butt-fugly, but it certainly speaks to some key, central issues of our day: our fruitless, superficial obsession with mortality/death/youth; the undeniable fact that our culture’s bling fetish helped fuel more than a decade of war, murder and bloodshed in Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia. It also of course, echoes, or rather blares, the old memento mori trick all self-respecting artists employ at least once (my personal fave is Ambrosius Holbein’s hidden skull in the map of Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” [1518].)
I could cite other examples, but you get the point: art doesn’t have to be pleasing or gentle or beautiful or even enjoyable to be art. It can be offensive. Formaldehyde, feces, fucking … they can all be central components of art. Murder? Not so much.
