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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

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Thinking Trying
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
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
BARBARA KRUGER

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

Language Pieces Stealing
I have no complaints, except for the world.
BARBARA KRUGER

Complaints Except World
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
It’s hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
BARBARA KRUGER

Class People Support
The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.
BARBARA KRUGER

Degrees Pieces World
I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Ideas Trying
What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition.
BARBARA KRUGER

Moments Recognition Trying
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
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
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
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
You make history when you do business.
BARBARA KRUGER

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

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

Political Sound Term
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
Love is something you fall into.
BARBARA KRUGER

Fall Love Something
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
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Figure World

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

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Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kruger Quotes