Few creators can claim the Museum of Modern Art and Rage Against the Machine as fans and collaborators. Yet, this is the unifying power of 77-year-old conceptual artist Barbara Kruger’s work: it’s immediate, powerful, and, as her legion of imitators has proven, it also looks great on a T-shirt.
Known for iconic text works proclaiming “I shop therefore I am” and “Your body is a battleground” – the latter given new life last spring as an incendiary cover for New York Magazine – the artist remains ever humble. “I believe that no work of art is as brilliant, amazing, awesome and major, or as failed, ridiculous, horrible and minor as it’s written to be,” she tells the Guardian. “All the hyperbolic claims, judgments, anointings and condemnations are as symptomatic as the works they address.”
