Barbara Kruger Quotes

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.

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

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

I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men. If this work is considered incorrect, all the better, for my attempts aim to undermine that singular pontificating male voice-over which correctly instructs our pleasures and histories or lack of them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Money talks. It makes art. It determines what food we eat, whether we are cured or die, and what shoes we wear.

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.

I'm living my life, not buying a lifestyle.

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

I have no complaints, except for the world.

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

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.

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

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.

You want it, you buy it, you forget it.

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

I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death.

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.

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.

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!

All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.

We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

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

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.

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

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

Memory is your image of perfection.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing - the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.