«You tended to contemplate these things after the fact more than you really beheld them in the moment: Kruger’s work is nearly always direct in address and billboard-speed in receptivity. Resolutely anti-hierarchical, the artist’s provocations have appeared on coffee mugs and city buses; they’ve covered the walls of a Lower East Side skate park and the exterior of a department store in Frankfurt, thus ensuring that even people who might never have entered a museum or gallery would have access to them: medium, message, place. She’s currently designing face coverings for a number of arts nonprofits, and her journalistic social critique has found its way into newspaper op-ed pages as recently as last April (“A Corpse Is Not a Customer,” read a recent piece for The New York Times). Increasingly, Kruger dispenses with images entirely, allowing the context itself to work its magic, as she did with “Untitled (Greedy Schmuck),” a black panel with the titular words printed in large white letters, which confronted visitors to the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in 2012. Thus, the seed of the message was planted, making you wonder, as it took root and bloomed, where you landed. Were you the schmuck, or merely another composite witness to the status quo, clever enough to be in on the joke but too comfortable and complacent to do anything about it?»
