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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

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
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’m living my life, not buying a lifestyle.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buying Life Lifestyle
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 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
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGER

Language Pieces Stealing
You make history when you do business.
BARBARA KRUGER

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

Artist Gossip Scary
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’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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Good Hard Mind Practice Time Work
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’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
the art world has always been an unrelenting taste machine, but now flavors of the month have morphed into flavors of the minute. Again, all a reflection of a wider cultural condition. I mean, the art world is slow compared with the music and movie businesses.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Mean Reflection
Doubt tempers belief with sanity.
BARBARA KRUGER

Belief Doubt Sanity
Memory is your image of perfection.
BARBARA KRUGER

Memories Perfection
Love is something you fall into.
BARBARA KRUGER

Fall Love Something

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.

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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.

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