Top 81 Barbara Kruger Quotes
#1. I like suggesting that 'we are slaves to the objects around us,' that 'plenty should be enough,' or that the 'buyer should beware,' within the context of conventional selling space.
Barbara Kruger
#2. Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.
Barbara Kruger
#3. 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
#4. I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
Barbara Kruger
#5. What I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition ...
Barbara Kruger
#6. Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.
Barbara Kruger
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
Barbara Kruger
#12. Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.
Barbara Kruger
#14. I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
Barbara Kruger
#15. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.
Barbara Kruger
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they're my terms, and they're not.
Barbara Kruger
#31. 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
#32. Money talks. It makes art. It determines what food we eat, whether we are cured or die, and what shoes we wear.
Barbara Kruger
#33. There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.
Barbara Kruger
#34. Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
Barbara Kruger
#35. Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.
Barbara Kruger
#36. Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.
Barbara Kruger
#37. 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
#38. I've never worked in advertising - my experience was as an editorial designer for magazines - but you could say, in the bigger picture, that magazines are vehicles for colour advertising.
Barbara Kruger
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
Barbara Kruger
#42. 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
#44. You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
Barbara Kruger
#45. 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
#46. One thing I learned working at magazines was that if you couldn't get people to look at a page or a cover, then you were fired. It was all about how you create arresting works, and by arresting I mean stop people, even for a nano-second.
Barbara Kruger
#47. 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
#48. I'm trying to engage issues of power and sexuality and money and life and death and power. Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other.
Barbara Kruger
#49. 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
#50. Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
Barbara Kruger
#51. I think that designers have an incredibly broad creative repertoire. They solve. They create images of perfection for any number of clients. I could never do that. I'm my client. That's the difference between an artist and a designer; it's a client relationship.
Barbara Kruger
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU'LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF.
Barbara Kruger
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.
Barbara Kruger
#65. All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype,
Barbara Kruger
#66. Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.
Barbara Kruger
#67. 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
#68. The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film.
Barbara Kruger
#69. All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.
Barbara Kruger
#70. I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
Barbara Kruger
#72. 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
#73. Teaching at university isn't like teaching in an art school.
Barbara Kruger
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. It's a small world, but not if you have to clean it
Barbara Kruger
#79. 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
#80. I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.
Barbara Kruger
#81. It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
Barbara Kruger
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