judd opens
at the Museum
of Modern
Art on March 1.
you know donald judd’s work even if you don’t know you know it. Judd is to minimal-
ism as Picasso is to Cubism. But unlike Cubism, which lives much more vibrantly inside
museum walls than anywhere else in the world, minimalism quickly achieved exit velocity
from the art world and took over ... everything. Since the 1990s, endless streams of derivative
decorators, designers, architects, less-is-more self-help gurus, Calvin Klein stores, landscape
artists, furniture-makers, and corporate-office planners have owed many of their ideas to
misunderstanding Judd’s notions of objects, space, material, and interior design, the built
and lived-in environment. His wall sculptures became wall shelves, floating on the white
space of generic HGTV-approved interiors and carefully layered with books and small sculp-
tures. He is in everything from the buildings we live in and the furniture we sit on to our work
spaces and iPhone design. Judd’s minimalism is the ubiquitous dark design energy of every-
day modern life. Always there, even if you never consciously recognize it.
Today, this might make it hard to see Judd’s work—showcased starting March 1 in a
MoMA retrospective, his first in 30 years—as art at all. In fact, his iconic boxes were meantAbove: Donald
Judd, Untitled
( 1980 ).