The Dessicated Groves of Academe

What does "art" consist of in twenty first century America? Checking in at Yale University's art program, we find one Aliza Shvarts extending what we already thought was the reductio ad absurdum in modern art's determination to undercut the very notion of art pointing to anything noble, beautiful, true, or good; to transcendence, in a word. But no expression is too vile, it seems, for those bent on "problemitizing" and"deconstructing" the very culture that produces multi-billion dollar universities, where leisure was once for the purpose of contemplating "the best that has been thought and written", but is now often used in pursuit of the vile, the pornographic, and the ideological. Young Ms. Shvarts has been using her privileged time at university--her parents must be so proud! to contribute her view of human dignity by repeated self-insemination followed by self-induced abortions, all artfully recorded on video. One wonders what the next expression could possibly be. But sad experience has shown there is always something lower yet to come.

There are both internal and external dynamics at play here. Internal to modern art itself, and all of modernity, is the by now familiar pathology of revolutions eating their own children--reason becomes un-reason, art is reduced to ruminations on bodily functions. Nothing true is built on a lie. Externally, this is just another demonstration of the corrosive effects of atheistic nihilism's removal of transcendent meaning in the world. Andy Warhol's soup cans yesterday, reproductive effluvia today.

Roger Kimball, always worth reading, ponders the moral detachment--no, the utter moral confusion or even depravity, of what was once a central pillar of Western culture. The shadows are lengthening, indeed.
http://newcriterion.com:81/articles.cfm/Art---ethics-at-Yale-3828