Explore Quotes by Robert Smithson

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

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

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

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 supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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