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

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
Like
Tombs
Museum
Museums
Turning
Artist
Everything
Looks

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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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Nature is never finished.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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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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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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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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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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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