Robert Smithson quotes

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Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
Robert Smithson
Architecture
Art
Habit
Painting
Sculpture
Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
Robert Smithson
Language
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
Robert Smithson
History
Events
Information
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
Robert Smithson
Art
Artist
Limits
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
Meaning
Words
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson
Artists
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
Artists
Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
Robert Smithson
Art
Development
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
Art
History
Time
Rest
An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
Robert Smithson
Emotion
Words
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
Art
Work
World
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
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.
Robert Smithson
Idea
End
Language
World
Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Robert Smithson
Language
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
Art
Day
Effect