Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Smithson

Smithson’s line lands like a cool slap at the era’s favorite civic habit: building something big in order to avoid thinking hard. The old monument is a blunt instrument of memory, designed to pin history in place and tell you what to feel about it. Smithson, coming out of late-60s conceptual art and the early environmental turn, notices a darker upgrade. The “new monuments” don’t merely curate the past; they anesthetize the future. They’re less about commemoration than containment.

His phrasing is slyly temporal. “Remember the past” sounds almost quaint, like the classical promise of culture. “Forget the future” is a more perverse achievement, suggesting a society so busy staging permanence that it loses the capacity to imagine consequences. In Smithson’s world - the world of entropy, of land art sited in pits, quarries, and salt flats - time isn’t a heroic upward narrative. It’s erosion, drift, systems breaking down. So a monument that pretends to be timeless becomes a kind of propaganda: it edits out decay, ecological cost, and the uncomfortable question of what comes next.

The context matters. Postwar America is bursting with megaproject confidence: highways, corporate plazas, gleaming “renewal.” Smithson sees those clean surfaces as ideological surfaces. They don’t invite public memory; they manufacture public amnesia by converting lived conflict into design. The subtext is accusatory: when power builds “the new,” it’s often building a futureless present, a polished pause button that flatters us into thinking history is settled.