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

Barbara Kruger

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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Believe Media
It’s really hard for me to use the term ‘history’ in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I’d rather stick to the pluralness of ‘histories’ in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.
BARBARA KRUGER

History Order Views
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 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
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 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
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Practice Two
Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art School Teaching
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Bucks Moving Thinking
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’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Ideas Trying
What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing – the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.
BARBARA KRUGER

Add Artist Technology
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Feminist Political
I have no complaints, except for the world.
BARBARA KRUGER

Complaints Except World
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Better Knowing Mixing Thinking
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

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

Art Money Shoes Talks
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGER

Language Pieces Stealing
I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Poor Rich Thinking
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Fashion Fun Mean
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 don’t necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It’s just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.
BARBARA KRUGER

Labels Thinking Way
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
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Different Ideas Space
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

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

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

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Popular Authors

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