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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

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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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 museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
Robert Smithson
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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
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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.
Robert Smithson
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Robert Smithson
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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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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
Robert Smithson
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson