Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

Judd’s shrugging “I suppose” is the tell: he’s smuggling ethics into a conversation about form while pretending it’s barely worth naming. Coming from an artist who spent a career insisting on specificity, material honesty, and the autonomy of objects, the line reads like an anti-sermon. He doesn’t say art should be “meaningful” or “uplifting.” He pins morality to craft: the stubborn obligation to make something well, to not lie with your materials, to not fake complexity with rhetoric.

The subtext is a rebuttal to two temptations that haunted postwar art. One is the heroic, moralizing artist-as-prophet mode; the other is pure aesthetic libertinism, where anything goes as long as it’s framed as “art.” Judd threads the needle. For him, “good” isn’t a tasteful adjective; it’s a discipline. It implies decisions you can stand behind: proportions that hold, surfaces that don’t pretend to be something else, constructions that respect gravity and space rather than sentimental narrative.

Context matters because Minimalism was routinely caricatured as cold, industrial, even inhuman. Judd quietly flips that critique. The morality isn’t in depicting suffering or preaching politics; it’s in refusing sloppiness, evasions, and secondhand gestures. Even the hedging cadence suggests a distaste for moral grandstanding. He grants ethics only where it can be tested: in the work’s coherence, its exactness, its refusal to flatter the viewer. In an art economy that rewards spectacle and explanation, Judd’s “morality” is almost scandalously modest: do the job, do it honestly, make it good.