Robert Smithson Quotes

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

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.

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

Establish enigmas, not explanations.

Nature is never finished.

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.

Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy

One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.

Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.

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

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

For many artists the universe is expanding; for some it is contracting.

The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising

An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification

The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.