Michael J. Lewis on Yale's Abortion Art Scandal

A professor of art at Williams College published a very interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, explaining that Aliza Shvarts's Yale art project--where she supposedly inseminated herself artificially and then gave herself an abortion--is "a fully characteristic example of the program and its students." Basically, given the faculty at Yale and hegemonic assumtions of the contemporary art world, this project was intended to get an "A." Lewis blames Yale University's art department, not the student, for this fiasco:

Given the choice of this arduous training or the chance to proceed immediately to the making of art free of all traditional constraints, one can understand why all but a few students would take the latter. But it is not a choice that an undergraduate should be given. In this respect -- and perhaps only in this respect -- Ms. Shvarts is the victim in this story.