Robert Smithson Quotes

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Is an artist much more than a beggar?

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

No one can ever create art, even on a piece of paper, as they have envisioned it in their mind.

I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.

I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

The artist is called a creator.

Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

artists try to say things that can't be said. in a fragile net of words, gestures, or colors, we hope to capture a feeling; a taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus not imitation. From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life - all movement and rhythm - time and light, color and mood - in short, all reality in Form and Thought.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.