original … the artwork exists as verbal narrative, […] installation, […] as time-based performance, as an independent concept, as a myth, and as public discourse.” Robert Storr, dean of Yale's art school, threatened to ban Shvarts from displaying her project unless she confessed in writing that the project had been a fiction and that no human blood had been used. Shvarts refused, and submitted an alternate project as her senior thesis. Yale ultimately admitted that the university “had been unable to determine with clarity whether Ms. Shvarts had in fact undertaken actions injurious to her health in carrying out her original project.” Reception In the month after Untitled [Senior Thesis] went viral, the piece created significant internet and media controversy, with many media outlets not seeing the nuances of the work. Some critics placed the work in feminist and art historical context. Feminist political commentator Amanda Marcotte praised Shvarts because she "managed to demonstrate the logic that drives things like blood libels and witch-hunts, where a group believes the impossible because it confirms their irrational hatred for a person they've turned into the Other." Brown University bioethicist Jacob M. Appel wrote in The Washington Post that "the history of great art is one of controversy and outrage" and that Shvarts was "an imaginative and worthy heir to" Manet and Marcel Duchamp. Kriston Capps objected to censorship of the work in the Guardian, noting similarities between Shvarts's work and “other examples of performance art that are recognized as groundbreaking moments in … art history,” such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden’s work. Conservative and anti-abortion websites, as well as pro-choice groups and media, were critical of the project, and condemned the university for allowing the work. Ted Miller, a spokesperson for the abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America called the project "offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage", and Wanda Franz, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, called the project "depraved." Since April/May 2008, Untitled [Senior Thesis] has been written about in the context of feminist performance art. Art historian Jennifer Doyle notes that the “project explores the discursive field through which the female body is produced and read as a reproductive body.” Art historian Carrie Lambert Beatty writes that the project's “central point [is] that what we take as biological facts are constructed in language and ideology,” noting the different implications of