Words matter. These are the best Robert Smithson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Art’s development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Nature is never finished.
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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.
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.
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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.
