Artists Quotes by Robert Smithson

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…

— Robert Smithson

“It’s like the end of the day where you feel nothing has been achieved and you’re in a hurry to get the day over…

— Robert Smithson

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

— Robert Smithson

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future

— Robert Smithson

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy

— Robert Smithson

Establish enigmas, not explanations.

— Robert Smithson

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

— Robert Smithson

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

— Robert Smithson

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising

— Robert Smithson

“Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in…

— Robert Smithson

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

— Robert Smithson

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

— Robert Smithson

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

— Robert Smithson

The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

— Robert Smithson

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the…

— Robert Smithson