Digital Art

Barbara Kruger at the Whitney Museum
( Published2001)

Author: Raphael Rubinstein

Back in late August, as I was about to begin this piece, I read a line in another critic's review of Barbara Kruger's retrospective that convinced me to put off writing about the show for several months. At the end of a perceptive review in the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz posed a question to Kruger skeptics: "In four months, we could elect another Bush as president. If so, who you gonna call?" Yes, I thought, one's evaluation of Kruger's work might indeed be colored by the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. This, after all, is an artist whose work came to maturity in the early years of Reagan's first term, and who subsequently pursued a critique of the rightward turn of American politics, as well as targeting sexism and violence. more