Barbara Kruger famous quotes

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Doe #Attention #Way

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 #Trying #Degrees

All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype,
-- Barbara Kruger

#Illustration #Violence #Stereotype

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Artist #Culture #Irony

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

#Thinking #Understanding #Feelings

I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Art #Thinking #Rich

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

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Doubt #Belief #Sanity

I've always been very tied to language.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Language

If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they're my terms, and they're not.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Political #Sound #Term

As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the ***** of sentiment never let up.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Princess #Media #Insane

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 have no complaints, except for the world.
-- Barbara Kruger

#World #Complaints

I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Artist #Ideas #Trying

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Class #People #Support

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 #Thinking #People

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

#Hard Work #Practice #Mind

Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Artist #Tactics #Rehabilitation

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

#Thinking #Labels #Way

I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Artist #World #Figures

I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Artist #Pictures And Words

It's a small world, but not if you have to clean it
-- Barbara Kruger

#World #Small World

You make history when you do business.
-- Barbara Kruger

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

#Want #Who We Are #Pictures And Words

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

#Art #Thinking #Honest

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 #Shoes #Money Talks

I remember going into galleries and seeing this thing called conceptual art, and I understand people's marginalization from what the art subculture is because if you haven't crashed the codes, and if you don't know what it is, you feel it's a conspiracy against your unintelligence. You feel it's fraud.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Art #People #Remember

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

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

#Art #Mean #Reflection

Love is something you fall into.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Fall #Love Is

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 #Thinking #Space

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

#Photography #Objectifying #Might

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

#Teaching #Writing #Practice

What I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition...
-- Barbara Kruger

#Trying #Recognition #Moments

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

#Moving #First Love #Night

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

#Views #Order #History

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

#Moving #Thinking #Bucks

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

#Drag #Surround Yourself #Delusion

Teaching at university isn't like teaching in an art school.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Art #Teaching #School

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

#Technology #Artist #Add

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

#Mean #Artist #Different

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

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 #Light #Ideas

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

#Art #Voice #Village

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

#Adventure #People #Focus

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

Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Careers #Tragedy #Rumor

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

#Girl #Artist #Gun

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'm living my life, not buying a lifestyle.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Buying #Lifestyle #Living My Life

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

#Thinking #People #Battle

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

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

#Opportunity #Space #People

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

#Book #Artist #Light

Memory is your image of perfection.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Memories #Perfection

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 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

#Book #Thinking #Events

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 #Sunday #Race

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

#Believe #Watches #News

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

#New York #Cities #Culture

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

#Ideas #Space #Different

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

#Profound #Tvs #Influence

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

GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU'LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF.
-- Barbara Kruger

#Hair #Giving #Brain

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

#Mean #Vocabulary #Looks

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

#Space #Slave #Enough

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

#Differences #Doubt #Belief

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

#Lying #Believe #World

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

#Art #Ambition #Understanding

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

#Power #Issues #Life And Death