Kenneth Goldsmith > Quotes

“The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

“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

“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

“Instagram something with the intention of it being taken down by Instagram. Take a screenshot of it; keep a record of it. Instagram the screenshot. Screenshot that Instagram. If it is taken down again, repeat the process until all you’re posting is a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot . . . of the original photo.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“The role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

“W: You sound like that man on the Times who considers my paintings to be sociological commentary. I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary. Sociological critics are waste makers.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews

“Your photo of the Eiffel Tower on Flickr is identically redundant to the millions already stored on Flickr, yet you keep on snapping them (just as I keep downloading MP3s).”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“The beauty of the Internet is that people can take things, and do what they want with them, to project what they want or feel.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“No fue sino hasta que sucumbimos ante la tentación que pudimos tomar conciencia de la insensatez de nuestros deseos”
― Kenneth Goldsmith

“Take the tech blog Boing Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most visible blogs on the web, but they create very little original content. Rather they act as a filter for the morass of information, pulling up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing they’re linking to. The culture of citation and name-checking on the web has resulted in a cascade of “re-” gestures: retweeting, reblogging, regramming, and reposting”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“If I thought I was only doing one thing—running—I would be naïve. Even in my leisure, when strapped to a web-enabled device, I’m furiously multitasking and, in a very positive way, highly distracted.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“This is the subject of an art work by the Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson called ScanOps. The project began in 2007, when Wilson was contracted by a video-production company to work on the Google campus. He noted sharp divisions between the workers; one group, known as ScanOps, were sequestered in their own building. These were data-entry workers, the people to whom those mysterious hands belonged. Wilson became intrigued by them, and began filming them walking to and from their ten-hour shifts in silence. He was able to capture a few minutes of footage before Google security busted him. In a letter to his boss explaining his motives, Wilson remarked that most of the ScanOps workers were people of color. He wrote, “I’m interested in issues of class, race and labor, and so out of general curiosity, I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs.” In short order, he was fired.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“For the past decade, art historians Hito Steyerl and Boris Groys have written in favor of “weak images,” claiming that in the digital age, a weak or cool artifact is more democratic than a strong or hot one.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“In Flusserian terms, it doesn’t really matter what we tweet (content); it just matters that we keep tweeting (apparatus). For Flusser, the content of any medium is always the series of apparatuses that produced it.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet