Your summary is a perfect insight into the work. As you said, her claimed meaning just doesn’t hold up. It is controversy for its own sake rather than anything with any substantial point or meaning.

Eh. I accept that most modern art is political… strives to be controversial. No, I don’t always appreciate it and this could be due to my lack of sophistication – but mostly I consider it lazy. Allowing controversy rather than the work itself to create the interestingness implies a lack of talent to me – but then again, I’m no art critic.

But this project is a flop for other reasons. As a stand-alone: it failed to make any point or statement.
And if the public reaction was intended to contribute to the performance: this wasn’t represented in any comprehensible way: therefore, I don’t see it. Literally.

Again: great study of culture/society. Shitty and somewhat misguided art project. So the lesson here is: oil or gouache are far better mediums than human behavior.

This is how some artists get street cred. It’s becoming harder to do as we’ve seen the following:

* Black and white photos of crucifixes in urine jars and gay anal fisting
* Pigs sawn into two
* Dessicated humans embalmed in clear acrylic
* Cutting off your limbs and having a car smash into your chest while filming your own death
* And now… filming your multiple abortions.

If you, the art public, doesn’t immediately rave over all this “art”, then it is implied that you are not sophisticated enough to understand and the subtleties and layers of meaning to be found in fancy high brow art work.

Jeffrey Dahlmer was an artiste, don’t you know! And Charles Manson as well. Perhaps Yale will give Charles Manson a Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts for his life’s body of artistic accomplishment.