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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

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
Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.
BARBARA KRUGER

Believe Lying World
Love is something you fall into.
BARBARA KRUGER

Fall Love Something
It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it
BARBARA KRUGER

Clean Small World World
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
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
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
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Mean Musical
Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I’m working in.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Rehabilitation Tactics
The different aspects of my activity, whether it’s writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don’t make any separation in terms of those practices.
BARBARA KRUGER

Practice Teaching Writing
I’ve always been very tied to language.
BARBARA KRUGER

Always Language Tied
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
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 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
What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition.
BARBARA KRUGER

Moments Recognition Trying
You want it, you buy it, you forget it.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buy Forget Want
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
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Figure World
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
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’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
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
I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author’s rendition of events and circumstances.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Book Thinking
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
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGER

Language Pieces Stealing
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Culture Irony
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’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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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