There is something abominable ...

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.
 Robert Smithson

Quotes from the same author

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
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy
 Robert Smithson
One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.
 Robert Smithson
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
 Robert Smithson
I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.
 Robert Smithson