The great American sculptor Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 35, was as interested in the history of the Earth as he was in the history of art. He once considered becoming a geologist and said that as a reader, “the entire history of the West was swallowed up” for him “in a preoccupation with notions of prehistory and the great prehistoric epics starting with the age of rocks.”

So he would undoubtedly have been pleased with a vote by the Utah Senate and the Utah House of Representatives to designate as official state works of art both his masterpiece — “Spiral Jetty,” the huge curlicue of black basalt rock he built in 1970, jutting into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah — and the state’s plentiful ancient rock art, petroglyphs and pictographs that have been widely celebrated and studied.