Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

"Pollock looks unusual and radical even now" is Judd doing something rarer than praise: he’s defending the staying power of shock. Coming from the artist who helped codify Minimalism’s cool, industrial restraint, the line carries a quiet sting. If anyone had reason to frame Pollock as a heroic but ultimately dated precursor, it’s Judd. Instead, he admits the work still refuses to settle into museum calm.

The intent isn’t just to compliment Pollock’s drip paintings as historically important. Judd is stressing their present-tense aggressiveness. "Even now" implies a world that should have caught up, a contemporary scene saturated with supposed innovation. Yet Pollock remains "unusual" - not merely different, but stubbornly out of sync with our visual habits. That word also dodges the cliché of "genius": it’s observational, almost grudging, like a formal verdict.

The subtext is a critique of how the art world domesticates rebellion. Radicalism is supposed to expire, to be filed under movements and market categories. Pollock’s paintings resist that bureaucratic afterlife because they don’t read as a solved problem. They’re not just expressive; they’re structurally strange: all-over composition with no obvious hierarchy, an image that feels more like weather or impact than design.

Context matters: Judd’s generation built an aesthetic that rejected Abstract Expressionism’s drama, yet Pollock persists as an uncomfortable ancestor. Judd is acknowledging a rival’s continuing threat - proof that modernism’s most physical, least "clean" breakthrough still has teeth against our polished narratives of progress.