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

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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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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 themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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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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