Barbara Kruger Quotes

What I think is dreadful about art is the way it's related to the money afterward. Not when you do it... But after that, it's like 5,000 rich people have access to it. A movie, even though it can be a bad movie or a good movie, it is more democratic. The people who buy my films, the people who buy my installations it's sometimes a foundation or a museum. When it's a foundation, it's related to very, very, very rich people - who are your enemies! Your enemies are feeding you. But you're not meeting them. So it's a very strange thing.

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

I am really interested in the idea that art can reach wider, can go further, can go beyond the art world, why not? People are intelligent, people are visually intelligent, and why shouldn't the work be able to engage some of that?

Since nostaglia is fueled by inflation, could it be that inflation is the result of a conspiracy by the people who are trying to palm off McGovern buttons and Howdy Doody puppets and their Aunt Thelma's toaster as antiques.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

Part of my mission is simply that: to bring the world of the arts, particularly classical music, closer to people so they don't feel that it is something remote that they have to specially prepare themselves for, or dress up for.

A series is a big deal, and there are a lot of people out there writing stuff that don't know what art is.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

The word “art” is something the West has never understood. Art is supposed to be a part of a community. Like, scholars are supposed to be a part of a community... Art is to decorate people’s houses, their skin, their clothes, to make them expand their minds, and it’s supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it... It’s supposed to be as essential as a grocery store... that’s the only way art can function naturally.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

Exceptional people deserve special concessions.

Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.

These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

When I was looking at the Russian Constructivists, these agitprop artists actually painted on trains. It was a heavy influence. They were bringing art to the people, to the masses, and breaking it out of the clubbiness of the art world, which is a monolith.

I suggest that the great art belongs to all people, all the time--that indeed it is made for the people, by the people, to the people.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don't think art is elite or mysterious.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

There aren't twelve-hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care.

Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place.

No one else understands us 7th sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes, we are often aggressively instructed to 'get a life' by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.