Art & Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

Judd’s complaint lands less like a sermon than a diagnosis from someone who watched postwar art trade conviction for posture. Coming out of mid-century modernism and into the churn of the 1960s and after, he saw the art world increasingly allergic to moral claims that sounded like authority: church, state, tradition, even “humanism” as a tidy package. In that climate, “denial” isn’t a neutral description; it’s a charge that the refusal itself has become a program, almost a style.

The phrasing matters. Judd doesn’t say artists reject morality because they’re wicked or shallow. He says art is “involved with” denial, suggesting complicity and infrastructure: the market, the academy, the gallery circuit, the critical fashion for irony and ambiguity. Moral absolutes are treated as naive, suspect, or politically dangerous; the safer move is to float above judgment, to aestheticize conflict rather than take sides. Judd is pointing at a cultural consensus where sincerity reads as coercion.

There’s an extra twist because Judd, a Minimalist, is often filed under “cool” and “nonmoral” art: objects that refuse narrative, psychology, and symbolism. His own work can look like the very escape hatch he’s critiquing. That tension is the subtext. Judd isn’t pleading for art to illustrate ethics like a poster. He’s defending the possibility that standards exist at all - that rigor, honesty in materials, and clarity of intention can carry ethical weight. In an era that made relativism feel sophisticated, he’s warning that the refusal to judge quickly becomes its own dogma.