Barbara Kruger on the buses in LA

LA's commuters are being treated to a bit of mobile conceptual art courtesy of 'Barbara Kruger buses' which began plying the city's public transport routes yesterday.

Twelve city buses wrapped in text produced by the LA artist will be accompanied by other works hosted on 85 billboards, bus shelters and other outdoor media sites, in a month-long campaign-cum-public-exhibition, promoting arts education in the city's public schools. The initiative is organised by Arts Matters, the arts arm of The Los Angeles Fund for Public Education. 

It's not the first time Kruger has gone on the busses; the conceptual artist, who was born in New Jersey and is currently an art professor at UCLA, created a similar bus wrap back in 1997 for the New York City's Public Art Fund. Once again, though her work is certainly a welcome sight, especially when supporting so worthy a cause.

"The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life," Kruger says . Or, as she puts it more pithily in one of her outdoor media works: "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."