Creativity Quote by Robert Smithson

Banal words, in Smithson's hands, aren't just boring; they're structurally compromised. Calling them "feeble phenomena" flips language from a tool of clarity into a weak natural event, something that happens to us and then peters out. The phrase "fall into their own mental bogs of meaning" is doing the real work: meaning isn't a clean dictionary lookup, it's a swamp where repetition, cliche, and inherited usage sink under their own weight.

Smithson was an artist obsessed with entropy, geology, and sites that resist tidy framing. Read through that lens, "banal words" resemble his interest in degraded materials and ruined systems: language as a landscape that has been over-mined. The subtext is a critique of the modern urge to communicate quickly and cheaply, to use prefabricated phrases that feel like sense but behave like sludge. The words don't fail because they're too abstract; they fail because they're too ready-made. They come preloaded with familiar associations, so the mind stops excavating.

There's also an artist's jab here at institutional talk: the glossy explanatory wall text, the press release, the critical boilerplate that claims to stabilize art by naming it. Smithson suggests that this kind of speech doesn't illuminate; it settles, like sediment, until it becomes its own obstruction. The irony is that he delivers the complaint in a baroquely dense sentence, performing the very predicament he describes: language trying to map a messy world and finding itself ankle-deep in its own metaphors.