Quote

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.

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
Kind
White
Submission
Artist
Lights
Art
Works
Light
Room
Convalescence
Stills
Seem
Esthetic
Seems
Rooms
Vacant
Still
Seen
Neutral
Going
Space
Spaces

More quotes by 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.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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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 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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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 museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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.
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Nature is never finished.
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