Top 34 Quotes by 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.

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.

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

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

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

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

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

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

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

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