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 Quote

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
- Robert Smithson Quote

An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
- Robert Smithson Quote

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

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
- Robert Smithson Quote

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

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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
- Robert Smithson Quote

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

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

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
- Robert Smithson Quote

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
- Robert Smithson Quote

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

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

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 Quote

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

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

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
- Robert Smithson Quote

When a finished work of 20thcentury 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 Quote