Quote

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

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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
Camera
Cameras
Photograph
Diminution
Machines
Gradual
Loss
Solar
Results
Recording
Energy
Photographs
Light
Machine

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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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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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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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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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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson