... and I will say it begin. You have to read the gossip sites if you want to know what's going on.

This morning Perez Hilton offers some scintillating historical context for Aliza Shvarts' "abortion as art" senior project at Yale:

Back in 2000, Jonathan Yegge was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute who did a public performance art piece that got the whole school, the local community and the entire worldwide internet talking.

Let's revisit his little "performance piece," shall we?

Yegge asked for a volunteer from his art class, got one, and then had voluntarily sign a makeshift contract stating that the volunteer was agreeing to participate in a performance piece containing acts "including and up to a sexual or violent nature."

Yegge led the volunteer out into a campus public area and then, let him explain in his words what he did.

"He was tied up. He had a blindfold and a gag, but he could see and talk through it. He had freedom of movement of his pelvis. I engaged in oral sex with him and he engaged in oral sex with me. I had given him an enema, and I had taken a shit and stuffed it in his ass. That goes on, he shits all over me, I shit in him. There was a security guard present. There was an instructor from the school present. It was videoed, and the piece was over."

Not long after the piece was finished, the volunteer developed misgivings about what had happened to him.

"He was pissed off, as he should be," says Ryan Castaneda, a friend of the volunteer (whose name SF Weekly is not printing for obvious reasons). "He felt he was being violated. He just didn't think this was cool."

The volunteer complained. The school administration called Yegge in, put him on academic probation, and instituted the Yegge-specific no public sex on campus rule.

Administration officials held lengthy meetings with Yegge's instructor, Labat. Discussions focused on the dangerous nature of exchanging bodily fluids for art's sake. Implicit was the litigiously dangerous nature of allowing this to go on in a supervised classroom.

The volunteer's mother was rumored to be a judge, and it was feared the student might sue. The volunteer, contacted through friends, did not want to comment for this story. But students at the Art Institute, the Academy of Art College, and in the rest of the tightknit San Francisco artistic community were riveted by the incident. One student enrolled in Labat's class was said to be going so far as to plan her own performance piece protesting Yegge's piece.

"She was pretty upset by it," said a friend of Labat's student who witnessed the piece.

The Art Institute, meanwhile, seemed to scurry into a damage-control posture.

"None of us know anything about it," said a flush-faced employee at the school's cafe in response to a reporter's question.

And after hours of closed-door meetings with the Institute's administration, even Labat attempted to distance himself from the piece.

"It was plain bad art," says Labat. "This was irresponsible in any context. It made me wonder why anyone would want to do a story about it. Why would anyone be interested in anything as basic as that? Nobody should be interested in that." But Yegge says Labat did nothing to stop the piece while it was taking place. Yegge also says he ran the general premise of the piece by Labat before performing it. Labat declined to discuss the performance in detail.

Interestingly, Yegge, like Shvarts, thought he was making some sort of totally hip and smart post-structuralist commentary on controversial contemporary issues centered on embodiment and choice: "It's about Heidegger, Derrida -- all this stuff," he said. "It's about pushing the notion of gay sex, pushing the notion of consent, pushing the notion of what's legal. We are living in the era of AIDS. This is about his responsibility, my responsibility."

But in actuality, his irresponsibility--and that of his professor-- touched off massive liability problems for his school. "The fix the Art Institute finds itself in -- it conceivably stands to be sued into oblivion by a distressed student -- is entirely of its own making," the Weekly noted. Yale isn't getting sued--but that's because Yale is lucky. It is easy enough to imagine the many litigiously provocative things that could have gone wrong with Shvarts' undertaking. Yale became responsible for every last one of them when it approved the project as coursework that could be undertaken for a grade.