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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

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.
BARBARA KRUGER

Belief Doubt Sanity
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
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 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
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
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
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
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Figure World
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
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
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 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
Fashion is everywhere and about everything. It is folly, vanity and the fun of it all. It is disguise, innuendo, and cunning. It is mean, gorgeous and ambitious, and definitely the last word for the next few seconds.
BARBARA KRUGER

Fashion Fun Mean
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
Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.
BARBARA KRUGER

Different Ideas Space
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
All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.
BARBARA KRUGER

Illustration Stereotype Violence
What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition.
BARBARA KRUGER

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

Art Poor Rich Thinking
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
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
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
Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art School Teaching
I’ve always been very tied to language.
BARBARA KRUGER

Always Language Tied
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
Memory is your image of perfection.
BARBARA KRUGER

Memories Perfection

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.

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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.

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