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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

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
Amnesia
Memory
Memories
May
Better

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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 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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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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 be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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