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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.

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
Past
Graveyards
Graveyard
Pretext
Museums
Parks
Ground
Memories
Reality
Congealed

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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.
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The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
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Nature is never finished.
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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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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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