"You shouldn't have to justify your work"
About this Quote
A line like this lands with the force of a door finally being shut on a familiar, exhausting room. Judy Chicago isn’t arguing for laziness or immunity from critique; she’s calling out an unequal burden that has long been treated as “professionalism.” In art culture, some people get to make work and let the work speak. Others - especially women, especially artists insisting on subjects the canon has sidelined - are asked to come pre-packaged with a defense brief: Why this? Why now? Why you?
Chicago’s career makes the subtext unmistakable. From The Dinner Party onward, she worked at a scale and with a feminist explicitness that institutions often greeted as if it were a problem to be solved rather than an artwork to be encountered. “Justify” is the key verb: it implies suspicion, as though the default state of certain art is guilt until proven innocent. Her sentence rejects the courtroom logic that has policed what counts as “serious,” and who gets presumed serious.
It also pokes at a second, quieter demand: the expectation that marginalized artists must educate their audiences while they perform. The quote insists on a different contract. Meet the work where it is. Sit with your discomfort. If you don’t like it, fine - but don’t pretend your confusion is a flaw in the artist’s legitimacy.
Chicago’s minimalism here is strategic. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a boundary. And boundaries, in a culture built on gatekeeping, are revolutionary.
Chicago’s career makes the subtext unmistakable. From The Dinner Party onward, she worked at a scale and with a feminist explicitness that institutions often greeted as if it were a problem to be solved rather than an artwork to be encountered. “Justify” is the key verb: it implies suspicion, as though the default state of certain art is guilt until proven innocent. Her sentence rejects the courtroom logic that has policed what counts as “serious,” and who gets presumed serious.
It also pokes at a second, quieter demand: the expectation that marginalized artists must educate their audiences while they perform. The quote insists on a different contract. Meet the work where it is. Sit with your discomfort. If you don’t like it, fine - but don’t pretend your confusion is a flaw in the artist’s legitimacy.
Chicago’s minimalism here is strategic. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a boundary. And boundaries, in a culture built on gatekeeping, are revolutionary.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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