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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.

Barbara Kruger

Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
BARBARA KRUGER

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

Looks Mean Vocabulary
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Crazy Mean
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Degrees Pieces World
I worked with someone else’s photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn’t that be my art?
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Eye Photo Way Word
It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it
BARBARA KRUGER

Clean Small World World
All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.
BARBARA KRUGER

Illustration Stereotype Violence
It’s hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
BARBARA KRUGER

Class People Support
I’m living my life, not buying a lifestyle.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buying Life Lifestyle
Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Doe Expression
The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can’t focus on longer narratives now – even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it’s an adventure film.
BARBARA KRUGER

Adventure Focus People
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Degrees Trying
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Hobbies Magic Photography
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Feelings Thinking Understanding
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Crazy Insanity Looks
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Battle People Thinking

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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