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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

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 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
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
Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.
BARBARA KRUGER

Made Real Technology
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
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGER

Language Pieces Stealing
I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Pictures Words
I have no complaints, except for the world.
BARBARA KRUGER

Complaints Except World
Doubt tempers belief with sanity.
BARBARA KRUGER

Belief Doubt Sanity
I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Opportunity Space
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
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
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
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
Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art School Teaching
What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition.
BARBARA KRUGER

Moments Recognition Trying
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
I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Ideas Trying
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 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
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
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
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 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
I’m living my life, not buying a lifestyle.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buying Life Lifestyle
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kruger Quotes