Barbara Kruger Quotes

I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

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

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 mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.

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'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Money talks. It makes art. It determines what food we eat, whether we are cured or die, and what shoes we wear.

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

I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.

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

Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

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

I think I developed language skills to deal with threat.

It's the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.

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 have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.

All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.

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!

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.

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.

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

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 want people to be drawn into the space of the work.

And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.

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.

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.

As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up.

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 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.

The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language.

Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.

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.

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

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

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.

The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life.

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.

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

I have frequently said, and I will repeat again, in the manner of any well-meaning seriality, that I'm interested in mixing the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.

I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.

I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.

... the thing that's happening today vis-á-vis computer imaging, vis-á-vis alteration, is that it no longer needs to be based on the real at all. I don't want to get into jargon - let's just say that photography to me no longer pertains to the rhetoric of realism; it pertains more perhaps to the rhetoric of the unreal rather than the real or of course the hyperreal.

You want it, you buy it, you forget it.

The different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.

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.

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.