Politics & Power Quote by Donald Judd

Judd is doing that cool, clipped thing critics do when they want to sound fair while quietly moving the goalposts. “The older painting” gets a concession - it “does have an effect all at once” - but the compliment is timed like a faint pulse: immediate, yes, then it fades. What really matters is “intensity,” Judd’s chosen metric, and he’s already tipped the scales by implying that intensity is the North Star of serious art.

The subtext is a generational power play. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Judd and his cohort weren’t just making objects; they were trying to dethrone a whole way of seeing. Traditional painting, especially the museum-stabilized “older” kind, is framed as a single hit of sensation - a quick gestalt. American work “in the last ten or fifteen years” (code: postwar New York, from Abstract Expressionism through the new hard-edged, industrial, literalist tendencies) is cast as more forceful, more present-tense, more demanding of the viewer’s body and attention.

It’s also a sly revision of what “effect” means. Judd isn’t praising narrative, illusion, or painterly finesse. He’s after impact: scale, material clarity, directness. The line reads like an artist arguing for his own ecosystem - the gallery as a site of confrontation, not contemplation; the artwork as a fact in space, not a window. “I suppose” makes it sound modest. It’s not. It’s an assertion that the recent American moment has raised the stakes and made the old masters feel, almost scandalously, polite.