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.
The cover of the May 16, 2011 issue of The New Yorker features a cartoon by Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu in which the image of recently killed terrorist Osama Bin Laden […]
“Why buy a Vermeer when a Metsu is available?” Adriaan E. Waiboer, curator of northern European art at the National Gallery of Ireland, repeats that odd sounding question in the […]
“Art,” Auguste Rodin once said, “is only a kind of love. I know quite well that bashful moralists will stop up their ears. But what! I express in a loud […]
It’s a common and tired trope of storytelling that the geek shall inherit the Earth. Revenge of the Nerds might actually be the pinnacle of this geeky genre. What makes […]
In the beginning, God separated the light from the darkness, and it was good. Growing up a Bible-thumping, Southern-bred, segregation-approving Fundamentalist, Barry Moser became a licensed Methodist minister at the […]
One of the surprising details of the death of Osama Bin Laden since President Obama’s announcement near midnight Sunday night has been the absence of what Shakespeare’s Othello called “the […]
One of the biggest debates inside the world of art criticism and scholarship is whether art, especially world art, can be understood without the idea of culture. In the debut […]
Our century now lays claim to our own Shakespeare—a 21st century Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s on Twitter, on Facebook, and even on Second Life, just like any modern producer and consumer of […]
In the midst of another April’s Poetry Month, it’s worth considering how closely the sister arts of verbal poetry and visual poetry can be. The almost symbiotic relationship of British […]
When Moses came down from the mountain, he carried along stone tablets bearing The Ten Commandments—the definitive law of God. An equally definitive word has been passed down in the […]
“What happened to Africa?” an art-world friend of New York Times writer Holland Cotter asked. “It disappeared.” What that friend was alluding to, and what Cotter analyzes in a recent […]
I always chuckle at the old joke about the dyslexic atheist holding up a sign saying, “There is no Dog!” Whenever talk turns to revelations and apocalypses, we all seem […]
Today is the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth. Shakespeare didn’t pull the trigger, of course, but his play “Julius Caesar” inadvertently triggered a series of events that inspired the act.
It’s not easy to imagine today in our world of high-speed photography and camera phones what it was like to have your photograph taken in the 19th century. The still […]
“Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth,” German artist Franz Marc once wrote. “All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work’s conventional exterior […]
The aftershocks of the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s decision to drop David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly” from their exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire […]
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s recent abduction is a testament to how powerfully the Chinese government fears the combination of art and communication technology.
“Disorientation is lost of the East,” novelist Salman Rushdie has written, reminding us of the original meaning of “Orient.” In The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art, 1854-1918, which […]
“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,” Dante Alighieri wrote on the entrance to Hell in the Inferno section of his allegorical masterpiece The Divine Comedy. The English translation usually goes something […]
Over the years, dozens of portraits have claimed to be the true visage of the bard–including a new contender, the Cobbe portrait. But can we ever know which one is real?
Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember well the phenomenon of the Members Only jacket. Whether you’ve found one in the back of your closet or not, you […]
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,” wrote T.S. Eliot in a […]
When Michael Quick searched high and low in 2007 for paintings by 19th century American master George Inness to include in what would be his award-winning catalogue raisonne of Inness’ […]
“Nobody has ever painted eyes, women’s eyes particularly, so well as Lawrence,” Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix wrote after visiting British painter Thomas Lawrence in 1825 and finding himself bowled over […]
“[I]n La Ruche you either came out dead or famous,” Marc Chagall said of the Parisian refuge of bohemian artists from Eastern Europe that he called home during his first […]
[The See/Saw Contest for Japan Continues; see the end of this post]I never met the man or even heard him speak, but hearing that art historian and author Leo Steinbergpassed […]
If you dnate to the relief effort in Japan, you can enter a chance to win this new book about the past and present of Japanese art.
Walk through a modern art gallery, and you’ll likely hear comparisons of the masterpieces on the wall to children’s finger-painting. But a new study proves that people really can tell the difference between the masters and toddlers.
One of my favorite minor masterpieces in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is Young Woman Drawing (1801) by French master Jacques-Louis David. Or at least it was […]
The best portraits look as if the subject could step right out of the frame and walk among us, maybe even sign an autograph or two. Recently, something like that […]