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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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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
Corny
Phenomena
Mental
Function
Meaning
Words
Bogs
Fall
Banal
Feeble

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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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 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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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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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output 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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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson
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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 slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
Robert Smithson