You requested that we not publish a portrait of you, which strikes me as an act of feminist resistance. But I wanted to ask you directly: what’s at stake for you in this?
The texts I wrote for Picturing “Greatness” will tell you. If my image or portrait has to be reproduced in an article, I don’t want to be included at all. There are images floating online and that pisses me off. I want my work to speak for me. Thank God I’m an artist and not an internet or TikTok or movie star; any time I go to a gala, all those people are fighting to get on the red carpet, but the photographers don’t give a flying fuck about artists.
And is there a reason you don’t post on Twitter and Instagram and such?
I have friends who are writers and use Twitter or Instagram as a public relations tool: this is what I read or this is what I eat, so this is what I am. But I’d rather go to hell than do that about myself. Really, everyone is needy in different ways.
— Barbara Kruger (via)