The James Dean of Art Upon the news of Robert Smithson's (1938-1973) untimely death, Michael Kimmelman, editor of The New York Times , summarily declared the artist--who was born in Rutherford New Jersey, and who perished at the age of thirty-five in a 1973 plane crash whilst working on a new piece--to be the »James Dean of Art«. A certain parallelism aside, the appellation is due to the phenomenal effect of Robert Smithson's site-specific earthwork...