With R. Crumb across town, you'd be hard-pressed to find an evening with a bigger conflict-of-interesting speakers than tonight. To wit: Barbara Kruger discusses life, conceptual art and big chunky letters at Bing Theater at LACMA. Living in the same art world as Jenny Holzer and the Billboard Liberation Front, Kruger discusses with Museum CEO Michael Govan her work in general and her elevator installation at LACMA, in particular.  Like most of her oeuvre — bold-typed, provocative, tangentially offensive phrases like 1982's “You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece” and 1987's “I shop therefore I am,” plastered all over public spaces — it involves pictures becoming words and vice versa, often played out across a collaged backdrop of middle-class imagery. The resulting agony in the art is gorgeous, and here you thought big blowsy slogans were just for, well, CEOs.

Thu., Oct. 29, 7:30 p.m., 2009

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