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

Robert Smithson

Artists

Mistakes

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

Robert Smithson

Content

Questions

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.

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

Robert Smithson

Advertising

Language

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

Robert Smithson

Museums

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

Robert Smithson

Nature

Development

Nature is never finished.

Robert Smithson

Nature

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

Robert Smithson

Art

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

Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.

Robert Smithson

Nature

Fact

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.

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.

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

Robert Smithson

Eye

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

Robert Smithson