Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

Judd’s sentence is a polite knife: it sounds like curatorial small talk, but it’s really a power move about who gets to define “relevance.” By saying “more or less contemporary with Hopper,” he keeps the takedown deniable. He’s not attacking Edward Hopper’s talent head-on; he’s questioning Hopper’s usefulness to the present, which in the late-20th-century art world is the sharper charge. “More relevant” isn’t a neutral descriptor here. It’s a criterion Judd helped institutionalize: art that doesn’t just depict modern life, but embodies modernity in its materials, scale, and refusal of nostalgia.

The subtext is Minimalism’s long argument with American painting. Hopper’s cinematic loneliness and narrative interiors had become a popular shorthand for “American realism,” a mood-board of alienation that museums and magazines could reproduce endlessly. Judd, by contrast, built an aesthetic that tried to exit the picture frame entirely: objects in real space, industrial surfaces, a kind of anti-literary stance that treats storytelling as a distraction. So when he gestures toward “artists...more relevant,” he’s implicitly nominating a different lineage - one that runs through abstraction, sculpture, and systems, not through scenes and psychology.

Context matters: Judd spoke from a position of authority as both artist and critic, in an era when “relevance” doubled as a market signal and a historical verdict. The line reads like a reminder that canon-making is not consensus; it’s contested territory, and Judd is staking his claim with measured, lethal understatement.