Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Kruger

Kruger’s line splits the American city into two economies: the places that shop culture and the places that manufacture it. Coming from an artist who has spent decades hijacking the language of advertising and power, the distinction isn’t a civic compliment so much as a diagnosis. “Consumption” isn’t just museum tickets and concert merch; it’s a whole way of living where taste is purchased, performed, and then replaced. By contrast, Los Angeles and New York appear as factories: messy, competitive, and globally syndicated.

The subtext is about infrastructure and authority. These cities don’t merely host culture; they control the pipelines that decide what gets seen, streamed, published, reviewed, and exported. New York’s galleries, magazines, and finance ecosystems translate aesthetic risk into prestige and capital. Los Angeles does the same with image production at industrial scale, turning narrative and celebrity into a world language. Kruger’s phrasing “not only national... but global” quietly points at cultural imperialism: what starts as local scene becomes a template that other places measure themselves against, whether they want to or not.

Context matters: Kruger’s work has always been skeptical of who gets to speak and who gets sold to. In the late-20th-century art world she emerged from, New York was a gatekeeping machine; in the Los Angeles of media consolidation, culture becomes a product with distribution baked in. The quote lands as a reminder that “culture” isn’t a neutral glow around a city. It’s labor, branding, and power - and the cities that produce it also produce the rules of the game.