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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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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
Artist
Confinement
Art
Imposes
Place
Exhibitions
Cultural
Limits
Asking
Takes
Curator
Rather
Exhibition

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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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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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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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 museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
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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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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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