black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Barbara Kruger

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

Made Real Technology
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Death Issues Life Power
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
You want it, you buy it, you forget it.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buy Forget Want
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Girl Gun Instead Pull
I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Poor Rich 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
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
If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they’re my terms, and they’re not.
BARBARA KRUGER

Political Sound Term
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Different Mean
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Delusion Drag Surround Yourself
I’m living my life, not buying a lifestyle.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buying Life Lifestyle
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist People Thinking
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’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
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Insane Media Princess

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kruger Quotes