Quotes from Robert Smithson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

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

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.

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.

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

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

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.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

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