Robert Smithson - Art Quotes

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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.

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. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. 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
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
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Robert Smithson
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead the viewer to things once called 'pictures' and 'statues. Anachronisms hang and protrude from every angle. Themes without meaning press on the eye. Multifarious nothings permute into false windows (frames) that open up into a variety of blanks. Stale images cancel one's perception and deviate one's motivation. Blind and senseless, one continues wandering around the remains of Europe, only to end in that massive deception 'the art history of the recent past'

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.

Robert Smithson
Size determines an object, but scale determines art.

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

Robert Smithson
Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

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

Robert Smithson