Politics & Power Quote by Donald Judd

Donald Judd’s line reads like a shrug, but it’s really a stake in the ground. As an artist who made his name by stripping sculpture down to industrial materials and unapologetic form, Judd is pushing back against a familiar reflex: the idea that “tradition” lives elsewhere, in older countries with longer timelines and grander ruins. The word “probably” is doing quiet work here. It signals skepticism toward art-world certainty while smuggling in a firm conviction: the American past isn’t empty, it’s just misrecognized.

The subtext is an argument with both coasts. Against European prestige, Judd suggests American culture doesn’t have to borrow legitimacy from Paris, Rome, or Bauhaus mythology. Against American self-mythmaking, he’s also refusing the easy narrative of the U.S. as pure rupture, a culture that only invents and never inherits. Judd’s practice sits in that tension: his objects look new, almost ahistorical, yet they depend on inherited American systems - manufacturing, standardization, the aesthetics of the warehouse and the frontier grid. Even his move to Marfa, building a long-term installation ecosystem in the desert, echoes older American habits of claiming space, making institutions from scratch, and treating landscape as both subject and infrastructure.

“People” is a small provocation, too: not just the public, but curators, critics, and tastemakers who prefer America as an upstart rather than a place with its own deep continuity. Judd isn’t asking for patriotism; he’s asking for seriousness.