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

Barbara Kruger

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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Cities Country Culture Production
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
GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU’LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF.
BARBARA KRUGER

Brain Giving Hair
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Opportunity Space
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Laughter Side Want
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Enough Slave Space
It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it
BARBARA KRUGER

Clean Small World 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
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Culture Irony
Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I’m working in.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Rehabilitation Tactics
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Honest Thinking
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Belief Differences Doubt
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Figure World
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Influence Profound Tvs
I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become.
BARBARA KRUGER

Pictures Want Who Word
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

Morning Race Sunday

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

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

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