Robert Smithson - Museums Quotes

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

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

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

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson