This is a very dispassionate reading of Shvarts' career at Yale which concluded with a proposal for her final art project that pushed numerous buttons. To say that the project was never well received is an understatement. The only dialog that it created was the type of anonymous verbal attacks that we associate with web comments. If there were any real critical analysis of her work, it was buried by unsigned questions about her sanity, motivations, or accusations about her as a person, her looks, etc. Really it was an art project that found an audience in internet trolls.
Unfortunately, publicly at least, Yale was ham-fisted in how it responded to the proposal and didn't guide their student to a responsible or even an academic response to her proposal's reception.
Unlike the focused and disciplined response to Abu Ghraib mounted by an army of neo-cons and their lawyers that was happening concurrently. Stephen Vincent Kobasa writes an essay in this month's journal comparing the public reactions of Shvarts and Abu Ghraib.
