Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Smithson
Age: 35 †
Born: 1938
Born: January 2
Died: 1973
Died: July 20
Art Theorist
Artist
Conceptual Artist
Draftsperson
Drawer
Geologist
Land Artist
Painter
Photographer
Sculptor
Visual Artist
Passaic
New Jersey
Robert I. Smithson
Surface
Outside
Objects
Disengaged
Becomes
Portable
Loses
Gallery
Art
Placed
Work
Charge
World
Object

More quotes by Robert Smithson

Image
The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
Robert Smithson
Image
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
Image
Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
Robert Smithson
Image
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
Image
As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
Robert Smithson
Image
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
Image
Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson
Image
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
Image
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
Robert Smithson
Image
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
Image
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson
Image
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
Image
The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
Robert Smithson
Image
For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
Robert Smithson
Image
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
Image
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
Image
A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.
Robert Smithson
Image
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson
Image
The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
Robert Smithson
Image
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