Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
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Famous Robert Smithson Quotes
“Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“For many artists the universe is expanding; for some it is contracting.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Establish enigmas, not explanations.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“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”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings