Saturday Links

Just Stop Oil just won’t stop, remembering Patrick MacGill, Marilynne Robinson’s “humorless nonfiction,” Truman Capote on form, and more.

Good morning! Two Just Stop Oil activists who threw soup on one of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings have been sentenced to two years in jail. The soup did not damage the painting, but it did cause £10,000 worth of damage to the frame. Phoebe Plummer, who represented herself, told the judge that “It is not just myself being sentenced today, or my co-defendants, but the foundations of democracy itself.” Shortly after the two women were sentenced, Just Stop Oil activists threw soup on the same painting and another Sunflower painting by Van Gogh at a special exhibit on Van Gogh at the National Gallery.

(By the way, Sean McGlynn reviews this exhibit in The New Criterion: “Hyperbole inevitably provokes a cynical response. Far too many art exhibitions proclaim themselves ‘a once-in-a-lifetime show,’ dare you to ‘miss at your peril,’ and any number of superlative endorsements. Thus, I was on guard for the National Gallery’s new Van Gogh show, ‘Poets and Lovers,’ which it is promoting as something even greater: a ‘once-in-a-century exhibition,’ no less. The preopening reviews are no less effulgent, with five-star reviews repeating that this is the National Gallery’s event of the epoch: The Guardian praises it as ‘heart-stopping’ and ‘dazzling’; Time Out calls it ‘mesmerizing’. This time, however, it is safe to believe the hype.”)