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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

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
Century
Representation
Values
Placed
Artist
Ideal
Social
Ideals
Political
Finished
Reinforcing
Past
Thus
Absorbed
Work
Garden
Gardening
Longer
Sculpture

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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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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 museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
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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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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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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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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
Robert Smithson