Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson
Image
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
Image
The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
Robert Smithson
Image
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson
Image
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson
Image
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Robert Smithson
Image
Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson
Image
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
Robert Smithson
Image
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.
Robert Smithson
Image
For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
Robert Smithson
Image
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
Image
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
Image
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson
Image
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
Image
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
Robert Smithson
Image
Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
Robert Smithson
Image
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
Robert Smithson
Image
Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Robert Smithson
Image
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
Robert Smithson
Image
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
Robert Smithson