Barbara Kruger Quotes

I'm living my life, not buying a lifestyle.

Look, we're all saddled with things that make us better or worse.

This world is a crazy place, and I've chosen to make my work about that insanity.

It's good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can't be personalized.

I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.

I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.

Fashion is everywhere and about everything.

It is folly, vanity and the fun of it all. It is disguise, innuendo, and cunning. It is mean, gorgeous and ambitious, and definitely the last word for the next few seconds.

I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.

I remember going into galleries and seeing this thing called conceptual art, and I understand people’s marginalization from what the art subculture is because if you haven’t crashed the codes, and if you don’t know what it is, you feel it’s a conspiracy against your unintelligence. You feel it’s fraud.

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.

Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.

Love is something you fall into.

There's a moment of recognition. It's that white-light kind of stuff that just "works." I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it's a movie, music, a building, a book.

the art world has always been an unrelenting taste machine, but now flavors of the month have morphed into flavors of the minute. Again, all a reflection of a wider cultural condition. I mean, the art world is slow compared with the music and movie businesses.

I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men. If this work is considered incorrect, all the better, for my attempts aim to undermine that singular pontificating male voice-over which correctly instructs our pleasures and histories or lack of them.

I think there are lots of ways to make good work.

You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.

I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition.

To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space.

It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.

I'm trying to engage issues of power and sexuality and money and life and death and power. Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other.

Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot.

It's a small world, but not if you have to clean it

Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!

Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag.

Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

Memory is your image of perfection.

You make history when you do business.

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.

What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing - the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.

We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.

Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me.

.. the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights.

I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death.

Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.

I want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments.

I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power.

I think people have to set up little battles.

They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.

If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture.

I don't necessarily think that installation is the only way to go.

It's just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.

GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU'LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF.

But I really resist categories – that naming is a closing down of meaning.

Women's art, political art – those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.

What I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition.

There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do.

Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.

I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.