Art and the Grotesque

My wife has a vague remembrance of reading something by Voltaire to the effect that when we lose sight of beauty, all that is left to art is the grotesque. Two examples, one warped, one truly grotesque if it is true. The squeamish might want to skip this one. From the April 21, 2008 Yale Daily News:

The University will not allow Aliza Shvarts ’08 to display her controversial senior art project at its scheduled opening Tuesday unless she confesses in writing that the exhibition is a work of fiction, Yale officials said Sunday.

The University, meanwhile, acknowledged that it has disciplined two faculty members for their role in allowing Shvarts to proceed with a project that she claimed included nine months of repeated artificial inseminations followed by self-induced miscarriages.

As news of Shvarts’ project swept across the Web last week and attracted the ire of students and private citizens alike, Shvarts and the University engaged in a match of he-said/she-said: Shvarts stood by her project as she described it earlier last week in a news release, while the University — claiming Shvarts had privately denied actually committing the acts in question — dismissed it as a hoax that amounted to nothing more than “performance art.”

And with the scheduled opening of her exhibition rapidly approaching, the University only intensified its criticism this weekend.

“I am appalled,” Yale College Dean Peter Salovey said in a statement Friday. “This piece of performance art as reported in the press bears no relation to what I consider appropriate for an undergraduate senior project.”

...

While showing diagrams of the exhibit to reporters from the News on Thursday, Shvarts said she planned to construct a four-foot-wide cube made from PVC pipe that would hang suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, wrapped in hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting. Between the layers of this sheeting would be thick coatings of Vaseline, which she plans to use as an “extender” for the display of her bodily fluids.

Shvarts’ plans also include the projection of videos of her possible miscarriages onto the plastic sheeting. These videos show Shvarts, wearing headphones and in a bathroom tub, removing blood from her body and collecting it in disposable cups.

Another piece of "art"--more stupid than grotesque--comes from the August 18, 2006 Daily Telegraph--and definitely you don't want to click over to this, unless you want to see the "artist" naked with the dead pig:

After pickled sheep, unmade beds and painting with elephant dung, some questioned where modern art could go next.

Kira O'Reilly will provide her own answer today by spending four hours naked, hugging a dead pig - at the taxpayer's expense.

The controversial Irish performance artist will invite one person at a time to watch her sit in a specially-constructed set and perform a 'crushing slow dance' with the carcass in her arms.
She claims the bizarre exhibition is an attempt to 'identify' with the pig, which she cuts with a knife during the show.

Visitors to the Newlyn Art Gallery in Newlyn, Cornwall - funded by taxpayers and the lottery - will be allowed to watch her for ten minutes. The gallery has defended its decision to stage the one-off show, but animal rights campaigners have labelled the performance 'sick'.

Anita Singh, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said: 'This seems to be a desperate cry for help that merits visits from mental health counsellors, not voyeurs.
'As Miss O'Reilly seems to depend on the shock value of using a murdered pig as a prop, perhaps lacking the talent to make it as a proper artist, may we suggest she take up a day job instead to pay the bills. This is not entertainment - this is sick.'

Under the title 'Inthewrongplaceness', the piece is billed as a 'slow crushing dance with a pig for one at a time'.

For once, I can agree with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals about something: British taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund this pretentious trash.