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 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.

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.

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

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 have no complaints, except for the world.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.

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

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.

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!

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

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

Memory is your image of perfection.