Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

Judd opens with a calculated shrug: "Building is just skilled labor, I suppose". The "just" is doing the mischief here, demoting the romantic aura of Art to the steady competence of work. Coming from an artist whose objects were often mistaken for industrial product, it reads less like humility than a refusal of mystique. He’s flattening the hierarchy between the studio and the shop, between the "idea" and the hands that execute it.

But then he pivots: "I don't mind other people building them". That’s not delegation as laziness; it’s a statement about authorship. In Minimalism’s wake - and in Judd’s own practice of using fabricators, metal shops, and standardized materials - the singular genius narrative starts to look antique. If the piece is conceived with enough clarity, someone else can make it without diluting its integrity. The work’s identity lives in decisions, not in touch.

The real love story is in the last clause: "the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot". Judd isn’t fetishizing craft so much as logistics: joinery, tolerances, material behavior, the blunt truth of construction. Subtext: meaning doesn’t have to be smuggled in through symbolism; it can be generated by structure itself. His intent is to re-train attention from interpretation to inspection - to treat fabrication as content, not backstage labor. It’s an artist’s manifesto disguised as a plainspoken aside, and that’s the point: for Judd, seriousness can look like practicality.