I Am Sure Of The Road

Gerard Van der Leun offers his comment about the "performance art" coming out of Yale:

"As it did for the outlaws and junkies of my old green house, the road that leads forever down has nothing but pleasures along the way, and there are never any real social consequences for taking it. We don't do "consequences" in this country any more. Instead we reward those that discover, as Shvarts has, new and ever more deeply depraved depths.

And don't think this little episode of glorifying multiple spontaneous abortions is the end. I often think "Surely, we've reached the bottom." And just as often I am reminded, as I am by the depraved Ms. Shvarts, that there really is no bottom; that an ever increasingly part of our "culture" (What a laugh!) has fallen more than half in love with easeful death, and will have it.

This is the triumph of the lie -- the lie of the mind to the soul that we so deeply prefer above all other lies.

People have actually come to believe that labeling something "art" gives it a Get-Out-Of-Condemnation-Free card; that there really is some sort of immutable and unwritten social rule that if I say something is "art," then everyone who says what I am about is depraved, sick, and evil must simply back off. It matters little that time will consign the 'art' of Shvarts to the sewer of works that vanish. What matters is that in her little time here she has already managed to degrade the souls of others just a little more, just a little deeper."