Donald Judd Quotes

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea... The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

The saying "the business of art is different than the purpose of art" makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art.

There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

Art functioning as propaganda is not art.

There are things going on in galleries recently that have shocked me. What I'm going to say is really controversial, but what I find the most provocative is the commerciality of art in general. And the fact that a lot of people have forgotten what the meaning of art is and what the intention behind it is.

Anything that might come under arts should not be subject to the whims of the idiotic market because the market's stupid, and it gravitates toward simplicity - towards essentializing things so they can be sold.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

What I'm doing is art - it's low-brow art but there's a magic in that.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art.

I was literally told for 'The Show Goes On' that I shouldn't rap too deep. I shouldn't be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don't need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down.