Quotes from Barbara Kruger

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

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 work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 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?

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

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

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.

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've never worked in advertising - my experience was as an editorial designer for magazines - but you could say, in the bigger picture, that magazines are vehicles for colour advertising.