Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

Robert Smithson
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
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
Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson
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
Robert Smithson

The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

Robert Smithson
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
Robert Smithson

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