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

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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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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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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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Nature is never finished.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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
Robert Smithson
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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.
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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Robert Smithson
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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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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
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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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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
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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson