Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

Judd’s line reads like a shrug, but it’s really a manifesto aimed at the art world’s old romance with inspiration. “I pay a lot of attention” is almost comically plainspoken, a refusal of mystique. He’s not selling vision; he’s staking everything on procedure. That’s the Minimalist gambit: make the work less about the artist’s inner weather and more about what’s materially, verifiably there.

The key move is how he shifts value from the finished object to “the whole activity of building.” Judd isn’t just admitting he likes fabrication; he’s re-ranking authorship. In the 1960s and after, he often had works fabricated by others, which scandalized people still clinging to the brushstroke as proof of authenticity. By framing construction as “interesting,” he positions labor, engineering, and decision-making as the real drama. The artwork becomes a record of choices about scale, proportion, color, surface, and the stubborn facts of materials, not a symbol to decode.

Subtext: no more alibis. If you care about “how things are done,” you can’t hide behind metaphor when the seams don’t align or the finish lies. This is also Judd quietly insisting on ethics: precision as a kind of honesty, clarity as resistance to the expressive haze that dominated earlier modernism.

Context matters because Judd’s America was awash in industrial production and corporate surfaces. He doesn’t merely borrow that language; he interrogates it. The “activity of building” becomes both a celebration of making and a critique of art’s tendency to pretend it was never made at all.