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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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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
Spread
Mobilize
Everywhere
Surfaces
Surface
Generalization
Becomes
Spreads
Eye
Museum
Artist
Collection
Museums
Untitled
Collections
Generalizations

More quotes by 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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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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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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Nature is never finished.
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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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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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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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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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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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.
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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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