Best 44 quotes of Robert Smithson on MyQuotes

Robert Smithson

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

  • By Anonym
    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 nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    For many artists the universe is expanding; for some it is contracting.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

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

  • By Anonym
    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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of stills through my Instamatic into my eye.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

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

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.

  • By Anonym
    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 past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

  • By Anonym
    Robert Smithson

    The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.