Time & Perspective Quote by Barbara Kruger

Kruger smuggles a provocation into what sounds like a mild definition. “Objectifying your experience” is an intentionally chilly verb choice from an artist famous for weaponizing the language of advertising. She’s not romanticizing inspiration; she’s describing a conversion process: lived time becomes a thing, an artifact that can be handled, circulated, argued over. The “flow of moments” evokes the private, unrepeatable stream of consciousness, and her point is that art arrests it, turns it into a surface. That’s a power move, but it’s also a risk: once experience is objectified, it can be consumed, misread, monetized.

The subtext fits Kruger’s whole project: in a culture trained to treat images and slogans as truth, the act of making an image is never innocent. When she adds “whatever” after listing mediums, it’s dismissive in a strategic way. The medium is not the moral alibi. What matters is the transformation and what it does in public.

“Art creates a kind of commentary” lands as the thesis and the warning. Commentary on what? On the world, yes, but also on the systems that package the world for us: gender, power, consumer desire, the authority of the caption. Kruger’s own practice collapses the distance between artwork and editorial, borrowing mass-media formats to expose how they steer perception. She’s arguing that art doesn’t float above life; it’s one of the ways life gets narrated, and therefore one of the battlegrounds where meaning is fought over.