A good article from last week's NY Times by my favorite art critic Michael Kimmelman: Pierre Bonnard Retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris.
An excerpt that comments on the current state of art:
"...Bonnard could not have known that young artists in the year 2006 would operate in a commonplace world of budget air travel, proliferating art fairs and museums for contemporary art, where peripatetic pilgrims encounter endless objects once and mostly never again. This, the artist and writer Art Spiegelman pointed out to me recently, may be the biggest change in art during the last half-century or so: that more and more artists make works they never expect will be lived with, looked at day in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby's attention without needing to be experienced twice. Culture slides into the realm of entertainment.
It is no wonder, then, as Bonnard could say even about his own day, that "few people know how to see, to see well, to see fully." In our visual age, amid a glut of freshly minted, clueless collectors, it's truer now.
But fortunately, Bonnard's work is still around to show us a different truth."
