Kenneth Goldsmith Quotes
-
My favorite method of encryption is chunking revolutionary documents inside a mess of JPEG or MP3 code and emailing it off as an "image" or a "song." But besides functionality, code also possesses literary value. If we frame that code and read it through the lens of literary criticism, we will find that the past hundred years of modernist and postmodernist writing have demonstrated the artistic value of similar seemingly arbitrary arrangements of letters.
→ -
For me, Twitter is a public persona. It's UbuWeb or Kenneth Goldsmith (as opposed to Kenny Goldsmith). I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion (what can you really say in 140 characters?), but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street.
→ -
I think it's time to admit that our writing is guided by the technology we use as much as it is by our own subjectivity.
→ -
The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning.
→ -
What I'm doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow it's never really been tested on the page.
→ -
It's not plagiarism in the digital age -- it's repurposing.
→ -
If you don't want something to exist - and there are many reasons to want to keep things private - keep it off the web. But if you put it in digital form, expect it to be bootlegged, remixed, manipulated, and endlessly commented upon.
→ -
Most artists want first and foremost to be loved, secondly to make history, and money is a distant third or fourth.
→ -
I don't have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called "conceptual writing." The idea is much more important than the product.
→ -
Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories.
→ -
Art used to make me see the world differently, think about things in a new way - it rarely does that for me anymore, but technology does that for me on a daily basis.
→ -
I don’t trust painting. At least not in New York. Most painting here relies on formula and repetition, whoring itself to the market. There seems to be no risk and once a painter gets a strategy, very little exploration. As a result, I stopped thinking about painting a long time ago. I prefer forms of art that are more market-resistant, more idea-based, more - for lack of a better word - risky.
→ -
I think that the special thing about radio is the off switch. If something's not pleasing you, turn it off.
→ -
Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists.
→ -
I've been trolled lots. But I understand trolls for what they are and I don't let them get to me. They take my bait, so I'm in charge of the discourse.
→ -
It's hard to be understood when addressing many people at once. How can you ever know if you're being understood? So, I've just started being intelligently provocative. And people take the bait.
→ -
Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me.
→ -
Automation and technology don't cure behavioral ruts: they just create new instances of them.
→ -
My books are better thought about than read. They're insanely dull and unreadable.But they're wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf.
→ -
How fortunate we are to exist in the moneyless economy of poetry! When you take money out of the equation, anything goes and nobody cares. It's truly free.
→ -
We're living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we're working with - the landscape of language - is very different than it was a few decades ago.
→ -
And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.
→ -
I don't think that the world will ever become an unpoliced place, sadly. But I do feel that there is relative freedom on the margins.
→ -
Conceptual writing is looking for that "Aha!" moment, when something so simple, right under our noses, is revealed as being awe- inspiring, profound, and transcendent.
→ -
I often don't endorse what I tweet, rather I want to throw things about to spark conversation or controversy. What I think about something is not particularly important when talking to thousands of unknown strangers.
→ -
I think that the richer and deeper documentation is on the web, the better off we all are.
→ -
New York City is just one node on the global cultural scene. Social media reflects the state of the world, so I've become more devoted to that. To be a NYC artist feels local and small. Social media feels now.
→ -
I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.
→ -
Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me. Art used to make me see the world differently, think about things in a new way - it rarely does that for me anymore, but technology does that for me on a daily basis.
→ -
I wonder if Karl Ove Knausgård would've written the same books today had been using Twitter. It wasn't around when he was writing those books. Those books were written during the age of the blog, with its big verbiage. The landscape has completely changed today.
→
Related Authors
-
Vilem Flusser Philosopher -
Stephen Burt Poet -
Eileen Myles Poet -
Lillian Hellman Author -
Kay Ryan Poet -
Andy Warhol Artist -
Randall Jarrell Poet -
Lorine Niedecker Poet -
Ron Silliman Poet -
C.D. Wright Poet -
Susan Howe Poet -
Kenneth Koch Poet -
Frank O'Hara Writer -
David Lehman Poet -
Rae Armantrout Poet -
John Ashbery Poet -
Robert Creeley Poet -
Lyn Hejinian Poet -
Young Jean Lee Playwright -
Jorie Graham Poet