Abstract

Art

Barbara Kruger is the absolute artist of the age of mechanical reproduction in its late-capitalist phase: Her product is the barbed image, designed to exist in unlimited numbers on the vernacular surfaces of inexpensive everyday objects, like mouse pads and T-shirts, tote bags and coffee mugs, wristwatches and umbrellas, as well as posters, postcards, book jackets, magazine covers and match-books. They are as much or even more at home in the museum gift shop as in the galleries upstairs, and since the objects there are purchased and carted away, they enter the stream of life and carry her messages into precincts far from the centers of high culture. Beyond that, she has evolved a format as instantaneously recognized as the great logos of commercial art, so that Andy Warhol, were he still around, could add Krugers to his repertoire of images everyone in the culture immediately identifies.