Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Nature is never finished.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

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
Robert Smithson

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Robert Smithson
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

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

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

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
Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson
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
Robert Smithson

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson
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
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
Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

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