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Home
Authors
Robert Smithson
American
Artist
About the author
Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Museums
Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Language
#Advertising
Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Words
I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Art
#Day
#Effect
Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Language
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#World
#End
#Idea
#Language
A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Art
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Work
#Art
#World
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Words
#Emotion
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Time
#Art
#History
#Rest
Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Art
#Development
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Artists
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Artists
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Words
#Meaning
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Art
#Artist
#Limits
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Information
#History
#Events
Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Language
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Architecture
#Art
#Habit
#Painting
#Sculpture
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Ideals
#Nostalgia
The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Past
#Act
#Reality
#Museums
#Memories
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Eye
Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#End
#Result
#Prison
#Control
#Artists
#Fact
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Time
#May
#History
#Museums
Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Nature
#Fact
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Forget
#Past
#Old
#Cause
#Future
#Monuments
Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Art
Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Nature
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Nature
#Development
When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Work
#Past
#Values
#Garden
#Sculpture
Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Questions
#Content
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.
Robert Smithson,
American
Artist
#Mistakes
#Artists