Barbara Kruger's Billboards

Barbara Kruger's billboard work calls for the viewer to rethink the way that the imperative is used rather than absorbing it uncritically as is the case in most conventional advertising, where it directs, say, the consumption of beauty products. Her method combined the "ingratiation of [the] wish desire" of advertising with her own "criticality of knowing better." In appropriating billboards or poster hoardings, the artist intervenes in and redirects the world of signs, opening it up to alternative meanings and inflections. Billboard and other forms of street art change the way that social space is produced and consumed, opening it up to imagination and creativity.

(From: Art and Advertising by Joan Gibbons, 2005).