What's in the Box?

Donald Judd wanted his work totally empty. Which allowed the world to make anything out of it.

- Jerry Saltz

YOU KNOW DONALD JUDD’S WORK even if you don’t know you know it. Judd is to minimalism 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 sculptures. He is in everything from the buildings we live in and the furniture we sit on to our workspaces and iPhone design. Judd’s minimalism is the ubiquitous dark design energy of everyday 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