CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/14/2022

Urgently relevant 'Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You' opens this weekend at MoMA

Featured spreads are from Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You—perhaps the most relevant book on our list during this time of extreme political turmoil, shifts in the state of social justice and pure American overconsumption. Published by DelMonico Books and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where one portion of the exhibition closes July 17, this book records "human behavior in capitalist society, drawing on social semiotics and retinal perception to reflect our basest impulses and most selfish desires back to us," according to noted essayist Zoé Whitley. "Kruger creates situations where we can meaningfully engage in systemic critique as well as self-reflection. How often might we otherwise consider the psychosocial stakes of feeling superior or inferior to others? Of examining our own actions when looking down on someone else, or reflecting upon the circumstances dictating whom we look up to? A clairvoyant narrator confronts us, conjuring images in the mind’s eye of our vulnerabilities and those, unseen, who might exploit them. Caught between this proverbial rock and hard place, the viewer must choose where to stand between hierarchies of speaking up and hero worship."