Wit & Attitude Quote by Barbara Kruger

Kruger’s discomfort with “public art” isn’t modesty; it’s a tactical refusal to let institutions pre-chew her work into a safe label. “Public” sounds democratic, even generous, but in the art world it often means sanctioned: commissioned, permitted, folded into a city’s branding strategy and defended as “for everyone” precisely because it won’t offend anyone important. Kruger’s line exposes how that word can function as a bureaucratic sedative.

The sly pivot - “If it means what I think it does, then I don’t do it” - is classic Kruger: a conditional that reads like a shrug but lands like a challenge. She’s pointing at the gap between art that merely occupies shared space and art that actually interrupts it. Her practice borrows the visual authority of mass media (bold type, clipped slogans, the look of advertising) to question who gets to speak and who gets spoken to. That work can appear on billboards, buses, shopping bags - places that feel “public” - yet it’s not public in the civic-mural sense. It’s parasitic and confrontational, designed to hijack attention rather than decorate a plaza.

“I’m not crazy about categories” is less anti-intellectual than anti-containment. Categories don’t just describe; they domesticate. For an artist whose whole project is about power - gender, consumerism, the politics of looking - rejecting the label is part of the method. It keeps the work mobile, harder to neutralize, and truer to the messy reality of publics: plural, unequal, and always contested.