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

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
Robert Smithson

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

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson

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

When a finished work of 20thcentury 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.
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.
Robert Smithson

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.
Robert Smithson