Creativity Quote by Sol LeWitt

LeWitt lands the insult with the flatness of a spreadsheet: the artist, in the modern economy, is treated as an appliance manufacturer. Not a prophet, not a craftsman, not even a bohemian nuisance - a producer slotting “output” into the same logistics chain as refrigerators. The phrasing is deliberately ungainly (“a factory that turns our refrigerators”), and that clunkiness feels like part of the point: the language of industry is incapable of describing what art does, so it spits out a weird, cold metaphor and calls it a day.

The intent isn’t just to complain about commercialization. It’s to expose how thoroughly the market’s categories colonize perception. When art gets framed as commodity production, the audience is invited to judge it the way they judge durable goods: reliability, finish, brand, resale value. Surprise becomes “innovation,” risk becomes “product differentiation,” and the work’s meanings become features you can list. The subtext is brutal: once you accept that frame, the artist’s interior life is irrelevant. All that matters is throughput.

Context matters here. LeWitt, a key figure in Conceptual and Minimal art, made a career out of separating idea from fabrication: wall drawings executed by others, instructions as artworks, systems that could be reproduced. He wasn’t naive about factories; he built an art practice that could look factory-like on purpose. That makes the line double-edged. It’s a warning about being reduced to a supplier, and a sly admission that modern art sometimes embraces the very industrial logic it critiques - not to sell out, but to show the machine from the inside.