Author Profile
Robert Smithson
1938 – 1973 • American • Artist
34
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 34 quotesThe museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.— 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
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.— Robert Smithson
The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.— Robert Smithson
Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .— 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.— Robert Smithson
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.— 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