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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
Tombs
Museum
Museums
Turning
Artist
Everything
Looks
Like

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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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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 be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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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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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Nature is never finished.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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