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

Robert Smithson

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

Robert Smithson

Nature is never finished.

Robert Smithson

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson

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

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

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

Robert Smithson

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson

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

Robert Smithson

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.

Robert Smithson

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Robert Smithson