“Deep Play, Dark Play”: Framing the Limit(less)

Abstract

She really did do it. Or did she really? And if she did, was she really serious? Whatever Aliza Shvarts (Yale College, ’08) did or did not do, she went from unheralded undergraduate to notorious provocateur in one news cycle. The tidal wave of e-traffic that hit the Yale server in mid-April, 2008 – protesting what she told a reporter from the student paper she was doing but hadn’t quite finished with yet – was unsurpassed in volume and rivaled in invective only by the 2006 response when the university offered special-student admission to Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, formerly deputy foreign secretary (that is, public-relations flack) for the Taliban. Before the Yale Daily News web site crashed, one critic compared Aliza Shvarts, valedictorian of her high-school class and college-senior art major, unfavorably to Adolph Eichmann, another favorably to Damien Hirst. Still another suggested that she might be “the first great conceptual artist of the internet age,” while someone purporting to be from Cal-Arts dismissed her as the perpetrator of a crass publicity stunt, which they had done there first (and better) anyway.¹ Before she had done all of what she said she was going to do, however, her Art School Dean disavowed it to the press, “If I had known about this, I would not have approved it.” Her College Dean, previously on record as an outspoken advocate of freedom of expression, added, “I am appalled.”² What did she do?