Art & Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

Judd’s line has the dry shrug of someone refusing the romance people want to staple onto art. He’s not talking about “taste” as some mystical lightning strike; he’s talking about the way liking gets built, almost engineered, through attention. In Judd’s world - the world of Minimalism and postwar suspicion of painterly emotion - “technical things” aren’t backstage trivia. They’re the main event: proportion, edge, finish, material behavior, how a surface meets light, how repetition changes time in a room. The phrasing matters. “A lot” is casual but expansive, and “you can get to like” frames aesthetic pleasure as something acquired, not bestowed.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that art appreciation is pure spontaneity, or that meaning must arrive packaged as narrative. Judd is defending an ethic of looking: if you stay with an object long enough, the supposedly cold, impersonal stuff starts to warm up. Not through sentiment, but through recognition. You learn the logic; the logic becomes satisfying. That’s how his boxes and stacks work on the body: they train your eyes to care about millimeters, about the difference between industrial precision and handmade insistence.

Contextually, it’s also a jab at the market’s hunger for personality and symbolism. Judd redirects the conversation away from biography and metaphor and toward craft as experience. He’s granting permission to be “moved” by the unglamorous - and insisting that this, too, is a real kind of pleasure.