Robert Smithson

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.

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

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

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.

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.

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

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.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.