Top 70 Barbara Kruger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it.”

— Barbara Kruger

2. “You want it, you buy it, you forget it.”

— Barbara Kruger

3. “I’m living my life, not buying a lifestyle.”

— Barbara Kruger

4. “You make history when you do business.”

— Barbara Kruger

5. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

6. “Love is something you fall into.”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

8. “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!”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

10. “I have no complaints, except for the world.”

— Barbara Kruger

11. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

12. “It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.”

— Barbara Kruger

13. “I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

15. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

17. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

18. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

19. “What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition...”

— Barbara Kruger

20. “Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

22. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

23. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

24. “Memory is your image of perfection.”

— Barbara Kruger

25. “There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.”

— Barbara Kruger

26. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

27. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

28. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

29. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

30. “Fashion is everywhere and about everything. It is folly, vanity and the fun of it all. It is disguise, innuendo, and cunning. It is mean, gorgeous and ambitious, and definitely the last word for the next few seconds.”

— Barbara Kruger

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31. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

32. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

34. “The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.”

— Barbara Kruger

35. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

37. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

38. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

39. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

40. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

41. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

42. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

43. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

44. “Doubt tempers belief with sanity.”

— Barbara Kruger

45. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

46. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

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

— Barbara Kruger

48. “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.”

— Barbara Kruger

49. “I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.”

— Barbara Kruger

50. “Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.”

— Barbara Kruger