Robert Smithson

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

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

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

“From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.”

“Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.”

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

“Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .”

“Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.”

“A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.”

“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...”

“Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.”

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

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

“Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.”

“Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.”

“Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.”

“History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.”

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

“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.”

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