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

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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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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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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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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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 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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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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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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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