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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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 I developed language skills to deal with threat. It's the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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'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.

I don't necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It's just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Love is something you fall into.

I've always been very tied to language.

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.