Robert Smithson Artist Quotations

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

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

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.

For many artists the universe is expanding; for some it is contracting.

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

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

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

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

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.