Academic

Art, Abuse, and Free Speech

By Calvin Massey

  Last week I posted an item concerning Aliza Shvarts, the Yale senior whose art project was said to consist of repeated self-inseminations and induced abortions (the art element appeared to consist of a video record of the miscarriages, together with a display of the physical evidence in the form of an emulsion of blood and vaseline warpped in plastic).  I took down the item when it became debatable whether this was or was not a hoax.  But the plot has moved on, and so I bring it back.  Yale issued a statement that it was all a creative fiction, and Shvarts promptly contradicted Yale in her own statement.  Now Yale says it has disciplined the lecturer and faculty adviser who supervised the project and asserts that it will not permit Shvarts to exhibit her work unless she "confesses in writing that the exhibition is a work of fiction."  Assume that Yale is bound to comply with the First Amendent (which, of course, it is not).  Can Yale validly bar the exhibit?  Is this a refusal to subsidize speech or a penalty imposed on it?  Refusal to subsidize, I say.  But does imposition of the condition of coerced confession of fiction change things?  Or is this, too, merely a refusal to subsidize speech that Yale deems inappropriate?  See, e.g., NEA v. Finley.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 21, 2008 (boomark / email).