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.
Ask a gaggle of economists which country has the world’s fastest growing economy and they’ll most likely say China. At the very least, most Americans see China as the world’s […]
“Philosopher” is one of those job descriptions in America that brings inevitable jokes about unemployability. Carlin Romano’s new book, America the Philosophical, aims at transforming the Rodney Dangerfield of academic […]
It’s no new news that the art world remains a man’s world for the most part, but that the situation’s getting better. Cindy Sherman’s major retrospective exhibition Cindy Sherman, which […]
When I read the news that the Bamiyan Buddhas, the giant 6th century statues in Afghanistan destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001, would not be rebuilt, I had mixed […]
Every May brings with it a new crop of college graduation speeches. This spring, few (maybe none) were as though-provoking as multimedia artist Laurie Anderson’s at the School of Visual […]
Ironically, America as a nation seems to have forgotten exactly what Memorial Day is about. Barbeques, all-day sales, the “official” start of summer—all of these threaten to crowd out the […]
Art isn’t usually a life or death matter, but the controversy over South African artist Brett Murray’s The Spear (detail shown above) might end in bloodshed. When Murray decided to […]
“My earliest memory is of anxiety!” cartoonist Daniel Clowes tells an interviewer in The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, the first serious monograph of the work of this seriously […]
Andy Warhol looked for fame any place he could find it, so news that a crater on the surface of the planet Mercury has been named in his honor comes […]
In 1923, during an exhibition of his art collection that would become the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, two years later, Dr. Albert C. Barnes told an interviewer, “I am […]
These are crazy times, so why should the art market be immune? However, there’s madness and then there’s sheer madness. Only half over, the month of May 2012 might go […]
On the one day that we think the most about mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, and all other motherly types, it seems appropriate to ask what is the greatest Mother’s Day portrait […]
“Who is it?” is often as big a question for art historians as “Who done it?” The mysterious model of many a famous painting—perhaps none so mysterious as the Girl […]
When does an artist become a phenomenon? It’s a rare moment on the scale of seeing a new star emerge in the night sky. Already a rising art world star, […]
Looking at art is an individual act. Just as wine connoisseurs ritually sniff, swirl, slurp, and (sometimes) spit, I enact my own curious dance before an artwork: moving in, moving […]
For everyone who loves their art and their sports, the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England, and the accompanying London 2012 Cultural Olympiad seem a match made in heaven. […]
“Nobody is representing anything,” Lucian Freud once said of all art, including his own. “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s a chair.” Elsewhere, the grandson […]
It’s commonplace to imagine the people of the period we know now as the High Renaissance, centered in Italy from the 1490s to the 1520s, looking at the works of […]
Americans too often forget just how young a country we still are in comparison to the countries of Europe. Like any other youth, we copied our elders growing up. Our […]
The still life, or, as the French would say, “nature morte,” died sometime around the middle of the 20th century, despite modern art’s attempts to resuscitate the genre into Cubism […]
If you’re a parent and you want to introduce your child to art, it’s sometimes hard to find that perfect combination of optimism and imagination in a single artist. Too […]
Art news always offers wonderful confluences that stir the imagination. The wonderful news that Paul Cézanne’s The Boy in the Red Waistcoat (detail shown above), which had been stolen by […]
“Why are we picking at these carcasses of creativity?” Holly Finn asks in a recent Wall Street Journal article, pointing her critical finger at the particular corpse of Damien Hirst’s […]
The self-titled and legally trademarked “Painter of Light” has been extinguished. When the news spread on Saturday that painter Thomas Kinkade had suddenly passed away at the age of 54 […]
It was the best of webcams, it was the worst of webcams, it was “must see” TV, it was “must flee” TV—in short, this has been an interesting week in […]
If there’s a villain in Rosalind E. Krauss’ newest book, Under Blue Cup, it’s Marcel Duchamp. Art fell in the toilet with the dawn of Duchamp’s Fountain.
With spring blooming all around us here in the United States, it’s natural that our thoughts go to, well, last spring, specifically the “Arab Spring” that saw the rise of […]
The duality is right there in her name: Francesca Woodman. Woodman, daughter of two successful artists and a promising photographer herself, cherished childhood memories of family trips to Tuscany and […]
Andy Warhol had his Campbell’s Soup Cans and Roy Lichtenstein had his comic book panels, but what will be the Pop artmeme of today? One possible candidate is the ubiquitous […]
One of the main reasons why performance art struggles to find a wider audience is because, almost by nature, it cannot reach a wide audience. A performance artist works in […]