46+ Robert Smithson Quotes On Education, Religion And Revolution

Robert Smithson was an American artist best known for his land art. He is most famous for his work Spiral Jetty, a large spiral sculpture located in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Smithson was a pioneer in the land art movement, which focused on creating art in nature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Smithson on education, leadership, religion.

Top 10 Robert Smithson Quotes

1. Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
2. 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.
3. Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
4. Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
5. A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
6. Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
7. Establish enigmas, not explanations.
8. 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.
9. Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
10. The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

Robert Smithson Short Quotes

• Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
• Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
• Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
• An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
• Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
• Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
• Nature is never finished.
• The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
• Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.
• Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

Robert Smithson Quotes About Artists

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. — Robert Smithson

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. — Robert Smithson

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

As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment. — Robert Smithson

For many artists the universe is expanding; for some it is contracting. — Robert Smithson

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. — Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson Quotes About Parks

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

Robert Smithson Quotes About Language

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head. — Robert Smithson

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence. — Robert Smithson

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising. — Robert Smithson

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. — Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson Famous Quotes And Sayings

One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. — Robert Smithson

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline. — Robert Smithson

Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light. — Robert Smithson

The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy. — Robert Smithson

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography. — Robert Smithson

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction. — Robert Smithson

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information. — Robert Smithson

One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph. — Robert Smithson

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

Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of stills through my Instamatic into my eye. — Robert Smithson

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye. — Robert Smithson

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. — Robert Smithson

Life Lessons by Robert Smithson

1. Robert Smithson's work emphasizes the importance of engaging with the environment and understanding the interconnectedness of all things.
2. His art encourages viewers to explore the boundaries between the natural and the man-made, and to consider the implications of human intervention in the landscape.
3. Through his work, Smithson encourages us to think critically about our relationship with the environment and to consider the consequences of our actions.