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Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith Books

Poet

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“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.”

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“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.”

WayNeedsGivingLooksDifferentMomentsFeelingsLanguageStrongSoundTypeGiving UpAddictionMeaningfulNarrativeShakesConstraintsUnconventionalSortingCoerce
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“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.”

IfsWritingYearsPastValuesSongHundredCriticismLettersMethodMy FavoriteMessArtisticCodeRevolutionaryDocumentsArrangementsLensesArbitraryLiterary CriticismEncryptionFunctionalityMp3
Author:Kenneth Goldsmith
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“Short attention span is the new avant-garde. 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. David Markson feels particularly relevant now. Twitter is the revenge of modernism.”

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“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.”

KnowsNeedsWritingYearsBookMatterFactsBehindsWeekExampleConceptsWeatherBest ThingsReportsSpokesPoetry IsMatter Of Fact
Author:Kenneth Goldsmith
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