Wit & Attitude Quote by Barbara Kruger

Kruger’s genius is to weaponize disgust. “Feeding frenzy” yanks the Diana story out of the soft-focus shrine of public grief and drops it into the ecosystem it actually belonged to: a marketplace where tragedy is meat and attention is currency. The phrase doesn’t just insult the tabloids; it implicates the entire chain of consumption, from photographers to broadcasters to the viewers who kept watching. Nobody is innocent in a frenzy.

Then she twists the knife with “pornography of sentiment,” a provocation that lands because it borrows porn’s logic: intimate exposure, repetitive arousal, a product engineered to bypass thought. Kruger isn’t arguing that mourning is fake; she’s arguing that the media industry can make feeling performative, compulsory, even addictive. “Never let up” captures the relentless loop of late-90s coverage, where updates became a kind of emotional drip-feed. Grief was treated like a plotline: cliffhangers, rivals, reaction shots, moralizing commentary, the whole apparatus of narrative suspense grafted onto a dead woman’s body.

Context matters. Diana’s death sits at the hinge between old tabloid culture and a newer, more totalizing spectacle: 24-hour news, paparazzi as celebrity, the public trained to process history as live content. Kruger, an artist steeped in advertising’s techniques and feminism’s critique of the gaze, hears that moment as a confession. The real obscenity isn’t sentiment itself; it’s the way institutions learned to monetize it, and the way we learned to mistake that monetized script for authentic emotion.