Barbara Kruger is yelling. In an extraordinary new Hollywood mural, the artist who is known for often blunt, declarative works that use plain language and sharp graphic design in ruminative ways has amped up the rhetoric.

Good for her. American society’s doomsday clock is ticking, and not only in a nuclear sense. Welcome her shouts.

At LAXART, the independent nonprofit venue that has just revamped its exhibition space, Kruger commandeers the otherwise modest building’s façade at a much-traveled corner on Santa Monica Boulevard. In mostly black, uppercase, sans serif typeface, poetic rat-a-tat-tat grabs passersby on foot or wheels.

When it comes to ordinary street signage for a pizzeria or muffler shop, we’re used to something more playful or beguiling than “break it, own it, steal it, loan it, kiss it, slap it, hug it, hurt it.” Kruger’s printed verb commands are like the frieze on a classical temple’s entablature; they’re held aloft by fat vertical “columns” between blocked-out windows.

Holding up the abusive orders, the columns’ white words on a black background sputter motivations: “pleasure, power, profit, property, poverty.” Rising from beneath the windows across a podium painted vivid green, foundational words demand: “privatize, monetize, moralize, terrorize.”

Atop such base ultimatums, the “it” that is being broken, owned, stolen and hurt is unidentified. Instead, the object of the punishing verbal actions is neutralized; it is something less than human, not irreplaceable.