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

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

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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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 memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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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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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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.
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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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Nature is never finished.
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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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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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