Much Ado About Nothing

The National Gallery finally got a "Donald Judd" for their collection, an event that someone at NGA thinks is newsworthy. The truly newsworthy part is something that NGA will never willingly reveal: how much the object cost.
The problem with Donald Judd is so convoluted that it cannot really be explained in a short essay. Well, it could be explained, but not without putting a reader into deep, near comatose sleep.
The problem is that, well, quite obviously, the object in question is not really a work of art. The reason why a plain wooden platform, painted red, sitting in the middle of a room should be mistaken by anyone for art is the thing that would require the thousand word somnabulistic history, and it would conclude with a moral that no normal person needs.
However, I'll attempt the brief Cliff Notes version and try to make it as painless as possible.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, someone noticed that art changes in big waves: the Middle Ages gives way to the Renaissance, which passes away before the Baroque, and each wave after wave reveals a society transformed. Or at least that's what art historians created in their narratives, a picture of change, organized as the historian understands it. Over time, bookish people, began to suppose that life actually transpired in the clean categories which the historian created to shape his story and at that point the distinction between "history" and "reality" got a little bit fuzzy (for the bookish).
They pretend and seem really to believe that "movements" took place where by one premier artist influenced all the artists around him until soon everybody began painting in a brand new way. Sometimes, of course, something like this does actually happen. But all along, while various people are imitating the grand Poobah, a very much larger number of other artists blissfully go on doing whatever they damn well please. And it has been ever thus.
But since art historians started writing art history and organizing it into neat little packages, the idea struck their colleagues in the "contemporary" art department that they could not only characterize what was happening in the exciting world of great art, they could make it up themselves -- they could coronate the various artists and pronounce which ones are "important" and "matter" and which ones piss them off and hence don't matter.
Fast forward. Somebody somewhere decided that Donald Judd, who designed boxes which were assembled by anonymous others, was the new golden boy. His "style" was minimalism, a "movement" that pushed art to the limits of meaning by making just about nothing into art. First one simplifies and afterwards one stupifies. Poof! "Minimalism" is born.
Quite recently, after Mr. Judd's rather convenient death, minimalism has vaulted into the prime place of 21st century movements.
What? You haven't heard? Well, if you don't know about this, consider it evidence that you probably have a life.
What you wouldn't want to know about this, though, even from the perspective of the delights of having a life, is how much it costs. All the money that the National Gallery wasted on this triangular red box might have been spent on real art.
You know what real art is, don't you? The kind that doesn't need the seven paragraphs of explanation.
Still, aren't you glad to know that plexiglass became Judd's "signature" medium? Kind of the way that, for some people, beer is their signature food. One could wish that the Trustees were about three sheets to the wind when they signed off on this one.