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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head

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
Ideas
Locked
Find
Physical
World
Somebody
Head
Idea
Language
Artist

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
Robert Smithson
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson
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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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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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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
Robert Smithson
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson