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Four years at Yale costs $180,000. Here is how senior Aliza Shvarts planned to conclude hers: The art major would repeatedly artificially inseminate herself, then induce miscarriages, which she would record on video. She would build a four-foot-wide plastic cube and wrap it in layers of plastic. Between the layers would be Vaseline mixed with blood from the miscarriages. She would hang the cube at an exhibition and project video of the miscarriages onto four of its sides. "This piece," Shvarts wrote in the Yale Daily News, "is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as...

"Horrified" is how Choose Life at Yale's Margaret Blume describes the general reaction of her peers towards Aliza Shvarts' senior art project, one in which the art major supposedly impregnated and induced abortions on herself over the past year. "Almost every student whom I encountered yesterday was horrified at the thought that Aliza Shvarts had repeatedly impregnated herself, only to induce miscarriages, and glory in her 'freedom' to do so. It was deeply reassuring to me that most of my friends and fellow classmates, regardless of their political views on abortion, shared my outrage for such an awful and unnatural...

Beginning next Tuesday, Yale senior Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ?as often as possible? while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages

NEW YORK, July 26, 2007 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Charles Merrill, the artist who recently edited the Holy Bible with a black marker and pair of scissors, has lately burned a rare Islamic Holy Book, The Koran, valued at $60,000.00, in an undisclosed Chicago location. "The purpose of editing and burning Abrahamic Holy Books is to eliminate homophobic hate," Merrill stated. "Both ancient books are terrorist manuals."..."Airplanes are flown into buildings because of words, and hate crimes against gays," Merrill said.

A Pacifica woman was arrested Sunday on suspicion of a hate crime for allegedly throwing fruit and vegetables at a gay couple while riding in a van, police said Monday. Tiffany Adler, 20, who works at a grocery store, was a passenger in a van in Pacifica on Sunday when she spotted a gay couple who frequent the store, according to police. As the van drove by around 7:50 p.m. on the 500 block of Esplanade Drive, she allegedly rolled down the window and threw apples and vegetables at them, police said. Later, the van turned around and approached the...

Barbra Streisand's politics didn't find a wholly agreeable crowd during her Monday concert at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise. As Babs traded political barbs with a George W. Bush imitator, a fan of the songstress who apparently disagreed with her politics pelted her with a beverage. And as her anti-GOP riff ended, another man in the crowd found himself being escorted out of the center as he shouted at Streisand. Streisand shrugged both incidents off, saying some people would do better to buy her records than come to her shows.

A naked performance artist who says she experienced fantasies of "interspecies metamorphoses" while working with dead pigs has angered British animal rights activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals criticized an exhibition where artist Kira O'Reilly sits naked for hours with a dead pig, planned for Friday evening at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance, southwest England.

3 Gitmo Detainees Reportedly Hang Selves (AP) WASHINGTON Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said Saturday. They were the first reported deaths among the hundreds of men held at the base in Cuba — some of them for up to 4 1/2 years and without charge. Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found "unresponsive and not breathing in their cells" early Saturday, according to a statement from the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive...

University of Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer has run afoul of evangelical Christians over his failure to take disciplinary action against a school newspaper for running sketches that depicted Jesus Christ in homosexual acts. Perhaps he is taking a cue from his brother’s controversial tenure as head of the National Endowment for the Arts. John Frohnmayer, who served the first President Bush as head of the NEA from 1989 to 1992, now teaches at Oregon State University. The brothers are a rarity in academia; they are Republicans. But if they typify the respondents in national polls, then Democrats dominate the Grand...

LONDON: A “performance artist” sparked a major security alert in London on Wednesday when she left five packages, one with nails sticking out of it, across a busy area of the city during the morning rush-hour, police said. The woman, who has not been named, told officers she had strategically planted the “devices” around the Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith Grove areas of west London, a major traffic and transport hub crammed with commuters on their way to work. Police, fearing a possible repeat of last July’s suicide bomb attacks that killed 52 people on the capital’s transport system, rushed bomb...

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- A 37-year-old Saratoga Springs man is accused of putting a roasted chicken in his pants as a means to steal it on Tuesday evening at the Price Chopper on Railroad Place in the city.

MILWAUKEE, WI (AP) - The Milwaukee Gay Arts Center has filed a claim against the city, contending it committed a civil rights violation by shutting down performances of a touring musical revue. An ordinance requiring a city theater license was selectively enforced against the center last week for a presentation of "Naked Boys Singing" because it is a gay organization, according to the claim filed Tuesday by attorney Richard Hart on behalf of the group. The claim said such a permit was never required for other productions in the past and that numerous other venues typically present theater performances without...

Syrian born artist, Hala Faisal, protests the war in Iraq and the occupation of Palestine by appearing in the nude with anti-war slogans written in both English and Arabic, in Washington Square Park Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2005, in New York City. Faisal was arrested by New York City police. (AP Photo/Ramin Talaie)

CHICAGO -- Performance artist Kerry Skarbakka, wearing a business suit and safety harnesses, jumped repeatedly from a museum roof to create photographs that recall scenes from the World Trade Center attack, drawing scorn from some onlookers and victims' relatives. Mr. Skarbakka, 34, fell more than 30 times from the five-story Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday. He said he started thinking about falling after watching on television as people jumped to their deaths from the Twin Towers on September 11. "What kind of a sick individual is he? Tell him to go jump off the Empire State Building and see...

Artist Stages 9/11 'Falls' From Museum Roof Thu Jun 16, 1:05 PM ET A performance artist wearing a business suit and safety harnesses jumped repeatedly from a museum roof to create photographs that recall scenes from the World Trade Center attack, but his spectacle was scorned by some onlookers and victims' relatives. Collaborating photographers snapped away as Kerry Skarbakka fell more than 30 times from the five-story Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday. The photographs will be retouched to erase the pulleys and wires that kept Skarbakka from hitting the pavement. Skarbakka, 34, said he started thinking about falling after...

Millions watched in horror as officer workers leapt from New York's World Trade Center Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Kerry Skarbakka was horrified, too, by the TV images but -- and he tries to be careful when he explains this -- he was also inspired. The scene sparked a fascination with falling -- the fear, the freedom, the fate. "I was so distraught, I needed some way to find an artistic response,'' he said. On Tuesday, the 34-year-old "performance photographer'' demonstrated his art by repeatedly plunging four stories from the roof of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, his arms and...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two gay Israeli men have installed a huge double bed in a New York art gallery and are inviting Arab men to become their "lover" as part of an exhibition called "Sleeping with the Enemy." But the artists who like to be known simply as Gil and Moti talk about the project in romantic terms, saying it's about "falling in love" rather than sex. Gil said visitors should not come to the show expecting to see pornography. "The bed is there for us to live in. Artistically there are three pillows to symbolize unity of three...

A woman has given birth as part of an exhibition in a German art gallery in front of dozens of spectators. Ramune Gele, 27, gave birth to her first child, a healthy baby girl named Audra, in the DNA art gallery in the capital Berlin. The father, 29-year-old musician Winfried Witt, who said before the birth "it's a gift to humanity, a once in a lifetime thing", called the experience "an existential work of art". Johann Novak, manager of the gallery, said the couple wanted to challenge conventional norms. "It's a bit of test to see if society can cope,"...

Bolshoi's 'porn opera' upsets the Russians By Nick Allen in Moscow (Filed: 24/03/2005) The Bolshoi Theatre was surrounded by protesters and paramilitary police last night as it raised the curtain on a production that some Russians have branded a "porno-opera". Placard-waving activists called for a ban on Rosenthal's Children, a contemporary look at Moscow's underworld of prostitution, alcoholism and violence. The work is the first new opera to be commissioned by the state-funded theatre in 30 years. It tells a curious tale of Soviet-made clones of classical composers including Tchaikovsky and Verdi, turned out on the city's streets in 1991...

Protesting as Performance Art. By Bernard Chapin Here in Chicago there are few better opportunities to meet your neighbors than during the yearly protest march which takes place on the anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Actually, one’s neighbors are rarely seen but Jessie Jackson, trustafarians, communists, anarchists, and depressives of all varieties are plentifully on hand. This is the third time that I have personally attended the rally, and I have to say that the mood of the demonstrators was more hostile on this occasion than in the past. Previously, amid the threats and overemotional lamentations, there was...