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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

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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
Object
World
Surface
Outside
Objects
Disengaged
Becomes
Portable
Gallery
Loses
Placed
Art
Charge
Work

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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
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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.
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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.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
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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.
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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
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson
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Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
Robert Smithson