Latest Kenneth Goldsmith Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I've been trolled lots on Twitter. 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

  Troll

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• New York City is just one node on the global cultural scene now. Social media reflects the state of the world, so I've become more devoted to that. To be a NYC artist today feels local and small. Social media feels now.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Artist, World, Today

  "What Would Twitter Do?". Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. August 15, 2014.

• For me, Twitter is a public persona. I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion, but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Opinion, Wonderful, Propaganda

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• 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.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Revenge, Complaining, Attention

  "What Would Twitter Do?". Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. August 15, 2014.

• I wonder if Karl Ove Knausgård would've written the same books today had been using Twitter. It wasn't around when he was writing those books. Those books were written during the age of the blog, with its big verbiage. The landscape has completely changed today.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Book, Writing, Age

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me. 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

  Source: logger.believermag.com

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

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Technology, Automation, Ruts

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

• What I'm doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow it's never really been tested on the page.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Art, Writing, Cinema

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

• 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

  Anything Goes, Care, Economy

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

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

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Artist, Want, Firsts

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 2011.

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

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Thinking, Special, Radio

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

• 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

  Want Something, Digital, Reason

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I don't think that the world will ever become an unpoliced place, sadly. But I do feel that there is relative freedom on the margins.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Thinking, World, Feels

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

• 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

  Successful, Thinking, Expression

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 2011.

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

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Thinking, Documentation, Deeper

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

• 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

  Writing, Simple, Profound

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 2011.

• 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

  Song, Writing, Past

  Source: www.believermag.com

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

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Communication, Mold, Stories

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 2011.

• 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

  Media, Different, Our Words

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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

  Thinking, Wish, Different

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 2011.

• 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

  Meaningful, Strong, Giving Up

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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

  Emotion, Language, Show Me

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I don't have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called "conceptual writing." The idea is much more important than the product.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Writing, Ideas, Important

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Book, Writing, Fiction

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

• My books are better thought about than read. They're insanely dull and unreadable.But they're wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Book, Thinking, Dull

  Source: www.believermag.com