Robert Smithson Quotes

45 quotes in 463 categories

• Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
• 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,…
• The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
• The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
• Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
• Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
• Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
• 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…
• An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
• Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
• History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
• Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
• Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising
• 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…
• Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
• History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy
• Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification
• Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future
• Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.
• The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

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