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.
If you think that a thumbs up in ancient Rome meant that the beaten gladiator would live and that a thumbs down meant death, you can thank Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 […]
“The main argument here is that pleasure is deep,” Paul Bloom writes early on in his new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We […]
I always used to laugh at people who ignored the lyrics to “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and thought it was a lovely love song. If it’s about […]
Growing up, I always found the few Black faces in superhero comic books fascinating, like rare birds. Luke Cage, aka, Power Man, bristled with attitude like Shaft on steroids. Black […]
“Painting is a battlefield… about what is, what is not, what ought to be, what I like, what I hate, what I love,” says Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, subject of […]
There’s a telling moment early on in Alison Chernick’s 2004 film The Jeff Koons Show, now available on DVD from Microcinema. Jeff Koons muses on his idyllic childhood and how […]
This has been the “Summer of the Spill.” Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, the epic BP oil spill has oozed into imaginations trying to […]
Df s;dlkj;fdslk ;lkfdj;lfdsjlkfdj My wife laughs at my penchant for taking photographs of sculpture when we travel. It’s as if I’m trying to bring these huge stone and marble marvels […]
In chemistry, a free radical is the name for an atom or group of atoms having at least one unpaired electron, thus making it unstable and highly reactive. From the […]
Experts commonly accept the Hudson River School, led by Thomas Cole, as the first true American art school and movement. They looked at the American landscape and saw something the […]
One of the most overlooked aspects of the life of Frida Kahlo is that the artist who exemplified Mexican national identity had a father born in Germany. Thanks to exhibitions […]
While Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece The Gross Clinic undergoes a facelift on the east coast in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (my […]
When you hear the name Edvard Munch, you almost immediately think of The Scream. It’s unavoidable. Even during his lifetime, Munch found himself linked to that image and a select […]
“Chucky Fat Face,” artist Chuck Close admits to being called by fellow artist Richard Serra during their graduate school days together at Yale early on in the film Chuck Close, […]
Los Angeles often feels like another planet to non-natives, from the confluence of cultures to the often unearthly architecture. In Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970, Thomas S. […]
“There was a time when building the future was inspirational,” Brian Fies writes in his new graphic novel, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? “Ambitious. Romantic. Even enobling. I […]
“Brion Gysin was a true subversive,” writes Laura Hoptman in Brion Gysin: Dream Machine, the text accompanying New York City’s New Museum’s exhibition of the same name. “Gay, stateless, polyglot, […]
“[The painting is] one of the most powerful, horrible and yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century,” wrote the New York Tribune in 1879 of then […]
“It gives you a whole new way of looking at the day,” Dennis Hopper’s character Billy says in the unforgettable film, Easy Rider, which the then 33-year-old Hopper also directed. […]
Leonardo da Vinci didn’t invent the sfumato technique, which produced the “smoky” effects of masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa, but he may have perfected it. For centuries, art experts […]
“There is certainly some strange power that has some overlook on me & directing my life,” Winslow Homer wrote in a letter to his brother late in his life. “That […]
When Huang Rui first set up the 798 Space Gallery in 2002, shortly after returning to China after years of exile for his anti-Communist regime art, he knew he could […]
Jenny Holzer works in words. Her art flows from the endless river of language that surrounds us. She dips her hands into that river and pulls out a tiny handful […]
Monday, June 12th, is judgment day for Yuri Samodurov, former director of Moscow’s Sakharov Museum, and Andrei Yerofeyev, a former curator of the Tretyakov Gallery. They face the possibility of […]
Growing up, I spent many a rainy or wintry Saturday afternoon watching classic old horror films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or Dracula Vs. Frankenstein. It always seemed […]
“Pure energy,” intoned Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in the classic Star Trek episode “Errand of Mercy.” (In 1988, Information Society immortalized the phrase when they sampled it into their […]
When I was a kid, I found myself glued to the television whenever a moon landing took place. Even when others grew jaded by repeated landings, I never lost sight […]
Leave it to a comic book icon to cause a flag-related stir as the 4th of July weekend approaches. Wonder Woman, everyone’s favorite 69-year-old Amazon, celebrated the 600th issue of […]
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then John Scarlett Davis must have been the sincerest flatterer in all of England in 1829. In the exhibition Seeing Double: Portraits, […]
“It’s time we Met,” reads several posters in the latest marketing campaign of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A recent piece by Peter Aspden titled “Met […]