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If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they’re my terms, and they’re not.

Barbara Kruger

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

Class People Support
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 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
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Culture Irony
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
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

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

Moments Recognition Trying

If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they’re my terms, and they’re not.

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If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they’re my terms, and they’re not.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kruger Quotes