Barbara Kruger Quotes - Page 2

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have frequently said, and I will repeat again, in the manner of any well-meaning seriality, that I'm interested in mixing the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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'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 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 want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments. I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power.

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've always been very tied to language.