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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

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

Art Poor Rich Thinking
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
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’ve always been very tied to language.
BARBARA KRUGER

Always Language Tied
Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art School Teaching
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
Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me… the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture’s power to construct our days and nights.
BARBARA KRUGER

First Love Moving Night
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGER

Language Pieces Stealing
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
Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Ideas Light
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
It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it
BARBARA KRUGER

Clean Small World World
The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life.
BARBARA KRUGER

Ambition Art Understanding
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
All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.
BARBARA KRUGER

Illustration Stereotype Violence
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
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
I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.
BARBARA KRUGER

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

Buying Life Lifestyle
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
I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Ideas Trying
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 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
Memory is your image of perfection.
BARBARA KRUGER

Memories Perfection

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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kruger Quotes