Barbara Kruger Art Quotations

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?

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 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.

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

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!

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.

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.

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

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

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

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,

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.

I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that 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.

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.