What Mr. Smithson might have thought about the drilling plan is among the issues in dispute. State officials and some art historians, pointing to Mr. Smithson’s own writing about the “Spiral Jetty,” and the film he made about its construction, said he reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebirth, rot and permanence.

Image Credit... The New York Times

“The sense of ruined and abandoned hopes interested him,” said Lynne Cooke, the curator at Dia. “He didn’t look for beautiful places, but rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap.”

State officials say that Rozel Point has always offered a fine tableau of the despoiled and the natural. A natural seep of oil sludge is right down the beach from the “Jetty,” harvested since pioneer days. And oil drilling was also under way, they say, in view of the “Jetty” in 1970, though it proved economically unviable. The new drill rigs, they say, are much farther away than the ones Mr. Smithson knew, and that can be glimpsed briefly in his movie.

“One of the things we’re having a hard time figuring is what the impacts will be,” said Dick Buehler, the director of the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands.

The deputy director at Dia, Laura Raicovich, agreed that Mr. Smithson had chosen his site carefully and loved some things that others might call ugly. But Ms. Raicovich said he had also been ambivalent about the context of the “Jetty.” He wrote about the rotting pier and the shacks that lined the shore, but in his photographs, she said, he kept the focus on the wild backdrop of the lake.

And the proposed drilling plan is different, Ms. Raicovich added, “because it’s a new addition and it’s pretty fair to say that it’s not desirable  on an aesthetic level it alters the physical experience.”

The executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, Lynn de Freitas, said an alliance of artists and environmentalists was also something of a new pattern on the lake. In 2005, when the state first proposed issuing offshore drilling leases, Ms. de Freitas’s group protested and raised the issue of “Spiral Jetty.” Few artists seemed to take notice then, she said. But when she learned in January that new applications for drilling had been filed, she alerted Mr. Smithson’s widow, the artist Nancy Holt, and an expert on the “Jetty,” Hikmet Sidney Loe. This time, the global arts community took the ball and ran with it.