This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Order a copy of the magazine here.
Don’t call Barbara Kruger a revolutionary. The legendary artist has a strong aversion to any kind of “political” labelling when it comes to her work, which may be surprising to anyone who has seen it. “I’m an artist,” the 81-year-old tells me, bluntly, from her home in the Hollywood Hills. Originally from Newark, New Jersey, Kruger has lived in Los Angeles for 34 years. She has spent much of that time – particularly the last decade – touring the world’s most prestigious institutions, from the Serpentine in London to the Guggenheim Bilbao, as they held reverent retrospectives of her career. Despite how omnipresent her work has become on protest placards, billboards, museum walls and even TikTok filters, she bristles at easy definitions. “I don’t make feminist art,” Kruger says. “I don’t make political art. I’m a woman who’s an artist, who’s a feminist. I really resist those categories.”
Kruger’s influence on visual culture cannot be understated. After beginning her career in magazines (she worked for Condé Nast as a designer, eventually becoming head designer at Mademoiselle), she moved into art in the late 70s. Her style was immediately iconic: black-and-white found photos overlaid with bold Futura or Helvetica text bars, typically with scathing, satirical overtones. Throughout her career, she has skewered consumerism, patriarchy and American power structures, and her knowledge of what makes an image travel – gleaned, she says, from her years working in editorial – has turned out to be strikingly prescient. Her signature collisions of text and image can be seen as early precursors to memes, and her visual language is so ubiquitous and impactful that it has been co-opted countless times over (most notoriously by Supreme, who lifted her red-and-white text aesthetic for their logo without her permission).
But despite her rejection of “political” as a label, it’s clear in conversation how deeply Kruger thinks – and cares – about politics. She is sharply critical of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, the market economy, media consolidation, the violence in Gaza and Ukraine, greedy landlords and Andrew Tate (“pretty soon he’ll be your prime minister”). It is exactly the kind of cutting, clear-eyed analysis you would expect from an artist who has spent five decades exposing how images produce and project power. If anything, she is a ferocious realist, though she would probably reject that label too. Below, she tells us more – in her own words.
“The collisions of image and text – that’s what I learned at magazines. I never thought anyone would know my name or my work. How prominence arises, who is seen, who is not, who is heard – it’s a heady mix of historical circumstance, social relations, arbitrariness, and accident. I feel fortunate my work has resonated.
“Co-option of my work doesn’t frustrate me. I find it amusing sometimes. You can’t control it. I don’t sue people. I don’t own a typeface. I don’t feel proprietary. It’s unbelievable to me that my work has the recognition it has, and only in the past ten years have I really had institutional support.
“I have so many friends who are brilliant artists who don’t have visibility, so I can hardly complain. I don’t have assistants. I’ve never had assistants. I don’t have a constituted studio. I’m sitting in a room that’s like an office in a house. I’m the first person in my family to ever own property. I’m not living month to month. Everything’s good – better than I dreamed. And I have a career, at least for the next 20 minutes. But the market is fickle.
“I taught for many years at UCLA, and I always told my students: make the best work you can. Get any job you can. The idea that artists could live off their work was unthinkable when I was young. We always had jobs.
“Just make the best work that you can. Don’t believe your own hype. When I see people hustling vapour and buying their own hype, I ain’t charmed by it”
“Young artists should also be aware of market forces. When you’re elevated really quickly, the market and people’s tastes are fickle. People follow the buzz, but the buzz doesn’t last long. Try not to personalise your success or your failures. No work of art is as brilliant and major, or as minor and pathetic, as it’s written to be. You should really suspect overblown praise or pathologically inflicted harm, and stay distant from both. Just make the best work that you can. Don’t believe your own hype. When I see people hustling vapour and buying their own hype, I ain’t charmed by it.
“It’s a very unsettling time in the US. Every day here is scary. Judges have fear. Politicians have fear. Teachers have fear. Universities have fear.
“I’m not a nostalgic person, so it’s not like I think things were better at another time, but the notion of law, of justice or rules? That’s over now in America. Regardless of how difficult the birthing of this nation was, and how damaged it was, it was still an extraordinary place. But that’s all changing now.
“I have never voted with my conscience. When I hear people say they vote with their conscience, especially young people, I want to say: the world is bigger than your narcissistic conscience. I’ve always thought and voted strategically. How does power operate? I don’t think about the word ‘politics’. I think about power and how it’s threaded through cultures.
“I dispute the notion of utopian futures and the idea of a romantic struggle. I’m very ensconced within the everyday. The grand gesture, the great movement – they will be ongoing, but I have a very sober eye. These romantic ideas of revolution, especially on the middle and the left – I just want to say, ‘Hey, guess what? There is a ‘rev’, and it’s coming from the right, folks!’
“Trump is a brilliant salesman. He can be affable and charming when he wants something, and he knows how to message. Every time the left and the middle would say, ‘Oh, he’s such a fool, a moron.’ I want to say, ‘You’re the fool and the moron!’ He ain’t no moron. He ain’t no fool. He is a brutal punisher who knows how to ingratiate himself.
“The right just speaks their desires, speaks their goal, and is unashamed about their drive toward dominance. I’m not saying the Democrats should do that, but they have to be able to get their message across, and not to say something in 36 sentences that they can say in four. That’s not to collapse meaning, but to reach people.
“Polemic isn’t a stodgy skill. It can work across class, across race, and the internet accelerates its power. That’s what we’re seeing now.
“I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I try to rely on my reality testing, on what is actually going on around me and in the world. It’s one of the reasons I’ve said for years that I’m never shocked at anything. Whenever I hear people say they’re shocked, especially in America, I feel it’s a misreading of what the possibilities of the misuse of power are. Never be shocked. Being shocked is a failure of imagination.”
