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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem

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
Ends
Problem
Proven
Mean
Mistakes
Artists
Dead
Mistake
Often
Artist

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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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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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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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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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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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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 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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Nature is never finished.
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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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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson