Kenneth Goldsmith

Using clear, readable prose, conceptual artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s manifesto shows how our time on the internet is not really wasted but is quite productive and creative as he puts the experience in its proper theoretical and philosophical context. Kenneth Goldsmith wants you to rethink the internet. Many people feel guilty after spending hours watching cat videos or clicking link after link after link. But Goldsmith sees that “wasted” time differently. Unlike old media, the internet demands active engagement—and it’s actually making us more social, more creative, even more productive. When Goldsmith, a renowned conceptual artist and poet, introduced a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet”, he nearly broke the internet. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Vice, Time, CNN, the Telegraph, and many more, ran articles expressing their shock, dismay, and, ultimately, their curiosity. Goldsmith’s ideas struck a nerve, because they are brilliantly subversive—and endlessly shareable. In Wasting Time on the Internet, Goldsmith expands upon his provocative insights, contending that our digital lives are remaking human experience. When we’re “wasting time,” we’re actually creating a culture of collaboration. We’re reading and writing more—and quite differently. And we’re turning concepts of authority and authenticity upside-down. The internet puts us in a state between deep focus and subconscious flow, a state that Goldsmith argues is ideal for creativity. Where that creativity takes us will be one of the stories of the twenty-first century. Wide-ranging, counterintuitive, engrossing, unpredictable—like the internet itself—Wasting Time on the Internet is the manifesto you didn’t know you needed.

Wasting Time on the Internet

"In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have engaged in 'uncreative writing'. Examining a wide rage of texts and techniques, including the use of Internet searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices adopted by writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol. Yet, more than just a reconfiguration of texts, uncreative writing can also be suffused with emotion and offer new ways of thinking about identity, tha making of meaning, and the ethos of our time."--Publisher.

Managing Language in the Digital Age

Uncreative Writing

The award-winning poet and author transcribes actual radio and television reports of national tragedies that reflected pivotal, iconic moments in American history, including the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, September 11, Michael Jackson's death and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon. Original.

Seven American Deaths and Disasters

Craig Dworkin

Charles Bernstein has described conceptual "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such s Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilities of non-expressive language.

An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Against Expression

Traffic

Soliloquy

Poetry. "Kenneth Goldsmith is without doubt the leading conceptual poet of this time. His poetry, which draws from Fluxus, Dada, and conceptual art traditions, is clever and self aware. With now classics such as FIDGET, SOLILOQUY, and DAY (all available form SPD), he has made poetry out of the mundane and when reading his work one is forced to reconsider the stakes and the measurements of aesthetic practice. THE WEATHER, a collection of weather reports, is one more test of poetry. And what is most striking about this book is that it aces the test. There is something wonderfully celebratory and shockingly pleasant and stimulatingly interesting about reading day after day of weather gone by"--Juliana Spahr.

The Weather

The position of Chief Learning Officer (CLO) is relatively new in business organizations, and little research has been conducted on this function. With the global proliferation of knowledge, the CLO assumes increasing importance for organizational success. This quantitative study explored CLOs' leadership styles and participation in strategic learning decision making. The study purpose was to determine whether significant relationships existed between learning executives' leadership styles, their participation in strategic learning decisions, and salient demographic factors. A cross-sectional survey design was used to test seven hypotheses with learning executives from U.S. companies. A significant relationship was found between CLOs' leadership styles and participation in strategic decision making, with statistically significant p values for transactional leadership (.034423) and laissez-faire leadership (-.18274).

Clo Leadership Styles and Participation in Strategic Learning Decisions

An uneasy combination of farcical comedy and hopeless tragedy, Traffic is a drama of Aristotelian proportions. Goldsmith's book unfolds like all classic narratives, tracing the beginning, middle and end of the action on a single day. In this case, the worst driving day of the year - replete with wanderings and errors, chance encounters, subplot snarls, and very real life-and-death results. But in the end, for all the horrific implications of this cultural catastrophe, Traffic has a happy ending: the midnight dream of the open road.

Perdere tempo su internet

No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96

In 1996, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. It grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation.

The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb

Duchamp Is My Lawyer

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand page beautiful homage to New York City Renowned poet and conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith collects a massive assortment of quotations about New York City in the twentieth century. This kaleidoscopic montage from hundreds of sources is a literary adoration of New York as the capital of the world, and was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project, a compendium of quotations about nineteenth-century Paris. Goldsmith brings together an immense archive of quotations about modern New York from novels, histories, newspapers, memoirs, letters, advertisements and more unlikely sources, all organized into lyrical and philosophical categories. The result is a magisterial and poetic history of New York in the twentieth century, and an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book of experimental literature.

New York, Capital of the 20th Century

Capital

Poetry. "I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity. On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's NEW YORK TIMES word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page." With these words, Kenneth Goldsmith embarked upon a project which he termed "uncreative writing", that is: uncreativity as a constraint-based process; uncreativity as a creative practice. By typing page upon page, making no distinction between article, editorial and advertisement, disregarding all typographic and graphical treatments, Goldsmith levels the daily newspaper. DAY is a monument to the ephemeral, comprised of yesterday's news, a fleeting moment concretized, captured, then reframed into the discourse of literature. "When I reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity"-Kenneth Goldsmith.

In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard. In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other “shadow libraries” and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb’s commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today’s gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.

Jens Hoffmann

Caroline A. Jones

The Arcades Project (1927-40), the monumental unfinished work of cultural criticism by Walter Benjamin, is the German philosopher's effort to comprehend urban modernity through the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcade. The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin combines artworks with archival materials and poetic interventions to form an original, multifaceted response to this collagelike cultural text. Jens Hoffmann astutely pairs works by thirty-six well-known and emerging artists, including Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, and Cindy Sherman, with the thirty-six "Convolutes," or themes, in Benjamin's text. Bound into the main volume is a graphic novelette, from the imagination of Vito Manolo Roma, of Benjamin's dream the night before he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Scholarly essays by Hoffmann and Caroline A. Jones, texts selected by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, reproductions of Benjamin's handwritten notes, and a list of the main Paris arcades discussed by him round out this extraordinary publication.

Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin

The Arcades

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.

Brad Troemel

Melanie Buhler

Geert Lovink

Ben Vickers

Karen Archey

Today it has become increasingly difficult to find a person or an object without some kind of connection to the internet. 'No internet, no art' is dedicated to exploring what this situation entails with respect to one cultural field in particular: art. This anthology forms both the culmination and a continuation of a series of public events titled 'Lunch Bytes: Thinking about Art and Digital Culture', held in Washington, D.C., which invited artists and experts from different fields to discuss their work in relation to this overarching theme. By opening up the often narrowly-defined discursive field of 'post-internet,' artistic practices are examined thematically within the larger context of digital culture. As such, this anthology offers valuable new contributions to the fields of art history, media studies, philosophy, curatorial studies, and design.

Kenneth Goldsmith

About

Books

Join the club