Robert Smithson

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.

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

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

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

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

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.

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 are no longer with us.