Crimson Tide

Here is the Harvard Crimson, comparing Yale's Aliza Shvarts's to Cornel West, a tenured professor who had the audacity to record a rap album. I'd expect that fellow students would take more seriously issues of academic freedom and institutional incursions into student speech (indeed, students are surely better placed to talk about it than me) and so it's disappointing to see the columnist mount a narrative critique of "sociopolitical progressivism" as manifested in a work that neither she nor anyone else has seen because the school has censored it. To read about the institutional dimension, you must turn to the august American Prospect, where Dana Goldstein has my back.

It only occurred to me this morning to dial up Yale's art and art history journal to see whether it had anything to say about the matter. A quick look at the Dimensions blog finds students who, as you might expect, would like to steer the debate toward context. Interestingly enough, on the Dimensions contact page is an image of a sculpture by Shvarts, the materials of which are plaster, vaseline, towels, rubber bands, and latex gloves. That would seem to suggest thematic continuity in the artist's work, the possibility of which her critics, the Crimson included, have dismissed. But who can say? The work will not be seen, not even by her fellow students, who lament, "[s]ince we'll never see it, we'll never know what she really did, or even what she intended to install, and that is the biggest ambiguity of all."