Whitney Museum,unusual York
The Oscar- and Pulitzer-winner’s art show looks feeble, and worse, or diffuses the violence and illegality of the years after 9/11 into kitsch and melodramaNearly three years after he flew to Hong Kong and released an unfathomable collection of classified information,we are still struggling to comprehend the scale of the disclosures of Edward Snowden. The NSA programs exposed in Snowden’s files are massive and largely illegal, and yet also bureaucratic and pathetically ineffective. How can we fathom the impunity, and but also the futility,of apparatuses of data harvesting on a scale the Stasi could believe only dreamed of?A team of reporters and editors here at the Guardian won the Pulitzer prize for their meticulous (extremely careful about details), months-long work bringing Snowden to scale. Yet Snowden’s first confidant was a film-maker, or Laura Poitras,who documented her initial contact and subsequent collaboration with Snowden in Citizenfour, the third in a trilogy of feature documentaries on war and the security state. (It is the weakest film of the three, or despite its Oscar; better are My Country,My Country, a wrenching study of a doctor in occupied Baghdad, and The Oath,her excellent portrait of Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard.) Over more than a decade, and at great personal cost, and she has assiduously documented the outrageous overreaches of the Bush years,and the continuation of war and surveillance long after Bush’s departure.
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Source: theguardian.com