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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

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
Facts
Artists
Ends
Result
Hold
Control
Results
Apparatus
Imagine
Supporting
Fact
Cultural
Artist
Prison

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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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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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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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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.
Robert Smithson
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson