Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday 29 January 2015


New on nybooks.com: A proposal to defeat the “assassin’s veto” on free speech, a closer look at the career of photographer Thomas Struth, how van Gogh developed his genius, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-nominated Birdman.
 
Timothy Garton Ash
The massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris was an attempt to impose the assassin’s veto. Where the heckler’s veto says merely “I will shout you down,” the assassin’s version is “dare to express that and we will kill you.”
 
ADVERTISEMENT
 
Jana Prikryl
Rather than obeying the modernist notion of the photographer as a heroic hunter in a forest of constant flux, able to foresee and capture every “decisive moment,” Struth’s images catch the history of a place the way a reservoir catches rainwater. He just gets up early, sets up his tripod, and stands very still.
 
Michael Kimmelman
Vincent’s early subjects were drawn with compassion but without skill at conveying their particularity and weight. They were symbols, types. A drawing like Miners in the Snow is a typically uncertain field of scratches and stick figures. Even so, the seeds of something special were being sown.
 
ADVERTISEMENT
 
Francine Prose
In Birdman Alejandro González Iñárritu has taken his cinematic nightmare to the Great White Way, illuminated it with Broadway footlights, located the pathos—and the hilarity—in the New York stage, and given us a cast of nuanced and beautifully acted minor characters.
 
THEATER
Gavin Francis: The Royal Shakespeare Company stages a dramatic reinterpretation of the 1914 Christmas Truce (Stratford-upon-Avon)
 
ART
Michael Greenberg: Patrick Killoran’s Exeunt Angels is a biting meditation on contract law, Faust, and the Citizens United decision (Brooklyn)
 
CONVERSATION
Ian Buruma and Michael Meyer will discuss Meyer’s new book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China (Manhattan)
 
BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS
Robin Lane Fox: Too few New Yorkers realize that they live in a city with the world’s greatest botanical library, which contains about one million catalogued items (Bronx)