When the Power Institute was established at the University of Sydney in 1968, he tutored to professors Bernard Smith, David Saunders and Donald Brook.
While in New York, he joined the Art & Language group of conceptual artists, including Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and Michael Corris,[1] and remained an active member 1972–1976.
When Ian Burn and Nigel Lendon returned to Australia in 1976, Smith joined with them to found Media Action Group, which soon was augmented by others, including Ian Milliss, and became Union Media Services (Sydney), an independent, artist-run organisation that provided graphic art services to the union movement and dissident groups.
He also edited many other books, including In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 1997), First People, Second Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999), Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 2001), with Paul Patton, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars (Power Publications, 2001; Japanese edition, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), and Contemporary Art + Philanthropy (University of NSW Press, 2007).
Smith's current work explores the relationships between contemporary art and its wider settings, within a world picture that he believes is characterised above all by its contemporaneity.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), contains a series of interrelated essays that unpack a vast range of topics and issues and take the reader on a theoretical tour through some of the world's most influential art museums, laying bare their conflicted missions and studying the heightening distinction, and dispute, between modern and contemporary art.