Kenneth Goldsmith famous quotes

03-24-2025

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

#Mastery #Genius #Information
Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Art #Inspire #Way
If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Littles #Ends
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.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#New York #Artist #Media
Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Thinking #Novelists #Lines
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.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Bait #Troll #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.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#People #Bait #Provocative
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

#Thinking #Talking #Important
Favoriting tweets has become a form of acknowledging that you've read what someone else has written.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Tweet #Form
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

#Character #Tools #Use
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

#Roots #Complaining #Use
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

#Simplicity #Sculpture #Way
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.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Art #Technology #Thinking
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.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Writing #Technology #Thinking
The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesnâ€™t need to be read. You donâ€™t have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you donâ€™t even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Hereâ€™s every word I spoke for a week. Hereâ€™s a yearâ€™s worth of weather reports... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Book #Writing #Years
It's not plagiarism in the digital age -- it's repurposing.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith

#Age #Digital #Plagiarism
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

#Real #Wine #Thinking

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