Bob Duggan
Contributing Writer
Bob Duggan has Master’s Degrees in English Literature and Education and is not afraid to use them. Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, he has always been fascinated by art and brings an informed amateur’s eye to the conversation.
Following the news stories of Maurizio Seracini’s search for The Battle of Anghiari, a “lost” 1505 fresco by Leonardo da Vinci that Seracini believes is hidden behind Giorgio Vasari’s 1563 […]
At the Brooklyn Museum’s current retrospective of Keith Haring’s early work, titled Keith Haring: 1978–1982, you can view what may be the earliest video of the artist at work. In […]
If Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus shown above seems a bit off, you’re right. In this version of “Venus on the Half-Shell,” the goddess is almost half her self, thanks […]
If you ever find yourself in a bar that takes art history trivia bets, here’s a sure winner: Who is the only artist to be named by TIME Magazine as […]
There are few American art festivals bigger than the Whitney Biennial, which has run as either an annual or biennial since 1932. Where art fairs such as Art Basel Miami […]
Nothing haunts like a skeleton in the closet. When art museums and cultural institutions talk about their treasures, there are always a few items they’d rather keep out of the […]
Museums around the world are threatened by lots of things today, but usually the mafia isn’t included in that long list. The Contemporary Art Museum of Casoria (CAM, for short), […]
Like a superhero masking their “real” identity, Cindy Sherman may be the most photographed person in history whose “real” face (whatever that means) remains a mystery. Since the 1970s Sherman’s […]
A recent report from Birmingham, England, announced that millions of British children were “culture starved.” Their proof of starvation came in the form of a survey of 2,000 parents from […]
How can you take soup cans seriously? Is it possible to make high art out of low brow bits from comic books? Critics and even fans of Pop Art have […]
Short of inventing a time machine and travelling back to the 16th century, we’ll most likely never know what Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa looked like when it was first […]
While walking in Fairmount Park in 1872 with his minister father, 12-year-old Henry Ossawa Tanner saw a man painting and became curious about art. His family fed that curiosity, which […]
“Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime,” Edmund Burke wrote in 1757 in his A Philosophical Inquiry Into the […]
Modern art takes itself much too seriously. Even the Pop artists often took the fun out of whatever they touched—a reverse Midas touch rendering even comedy gold into dross. Andy […]
“If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature,” David Hockney says in Bruno Wollheim’s film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, “because there’s the […]
A new tour at the Museum of Modern Art in New York has many seeing red over “seeing” Reds in the collection. As reported in Art News, Artist Yevgeniy Fiks’ […]
What drives an artist to destroy something they spent their time and energy on to create? Hatred? Self-disgust? Embarassment? Fear of how it might be interpreted or misinterpreted? German artist […]
Like doctors, artists should obey one rule above all, “To do no harm.” When you’re Christo and you specialize in “environmental art,” that rule takes on an even greater importance. […]
One of the biggest problems with lists is that with lists come labels. A list of African-American artists or women artists already sets them up as different (and perhaps less, […]
“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” says washed-up silent film star Norma Desmond in the final scene of Billy Wilder’s unforgettable 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson […]
If you saw someone dying before your eyes, wouldn’t you do everything possible to save them? Is there ever a case when saving someone (or something) is the wrong choice? […]
What is that “Presidential” look? Consciously or subconsciously, American voters ask themselves that question every four years on the way to the ballot box. Is it the Mount Rushmore-ready chin, […]
“The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing,” performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson says in […]
Using money she had received for her 30th birthday, Zoe Strauss bought a camera in 2000 and began shooting a 10-year project that had previously existed only in her imagination. […]
My first introduction to newspaper reading was the Sunday comics. Stretched out on the floor beside my Dad, both of us propped up on our elbows, we read everything from […]
Long before she ever met John Lennon, Yoko Ono established herself as a significant international avant-garde artist. With John by her side, Yoko’s political performance art found a larger audience […]
If you know the name of artist Chris Burden, you probably think pain: shooting, electrocution, and even crucifixion. Although Burden ended his agonizing exploits over 35 years ago, those performance […]
Last month saw the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II. Sadly, that day of infamy led to a different […]
By pulling her pants down and defacing Clyfford Still’s painting 1957-J No. 2 (PH-401) (shown above, from 1957) last week at The Clyfford Still Museum, Carmen Lucette Tisch stumbled drunkenly […]
No sooner do I make a list of the must-see exhibitions of 2012 that includes exhibitions featuring both David Hockney (above, left) and Damien Hirst (above, right) then we get […]