Kenneth Goldsmith Quotes & Sayings

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. — Kenneth Goldsmith

You can't show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

I think that the special thing about radio is the off switch. If something's not pleasing you, turn it off. — Kenneth Goldsmith

All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

It's Twitter's combination of simplicity and complexity that is astonishing in the same way that minimalist sculpture was inspiring and enlightening. — Kenneth Goldsmith

It's not plagiarism in the digital age
it's repurposing. — Kenneth Goldsmith

You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I'm telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren't reading it. — Kenneth Goldsmith

The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don't even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here's every word I spoke for a week. Here's a year's worth of weather reports ... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Automation and technology don't cure behavioral ruts: they just create new instances of them. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. I prefer forms of art that are more market-resistant, more idea-based, more - for lack of a better word - risky. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Most artists want first and foremost to be loved, secondly to make history, and money is a distant third or fourth. — Kenneth Goldsmith

I think that the richer and deeper documentation is on the web, the better off we all are. — Kenneth Goldsmith

If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

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. — Kenneth Goldsmith

I think that writers often try too hard in the name of expression, when often it's just a matter of reframing what's around you or republishing a preexisting text into a new environment that makes for a successful work. — Kenneth Goldsmith

An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Favoriting tweets has become a form of acknowledging that you've read what someone else has written. — Kenneth Goldsmith