Kenneth Goldsmith

Born	June 4, 1961(1961-06-04) Freeport, Long Island, New York, United States
Web	UbuWeb, Aaaaarg, Wikipedia, Academia.edu

Kenneth Goldsmith (1961) is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches. He is also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. Goldsmith hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is the author of three books of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Wasting Time on The Internet (2016), and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.

Goldsmith was born in Freeport, New York, to a family employed in the garment industry. He attended various schools in Long Island and Port Washington before receiving a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1984. From 1995-2010, he was the host of a weekly radio show on New York City's WFMU. He is the editor I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. Goldsmith held the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-2010 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In 2011, he co-edited, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Later he published a book, Wasting Time on the Internet, based on his class of uncreative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

His work has been subject to two film documentaries. In March 2018, Goldsmith was honored by a symposium at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens, Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens, which included discussions, performances and an exhibition. Participants included Peter Sunde (The Pirate Bay), Marcell Mars, Tom McCarthy, Dušan Barok, Emily Segal, People Like Us, Craig Dworkin, David Desrimais, Dina Kelberman, and Coco Sollfrank. The event was organized and curated by Ilan Manouach.

He and his wife, artist Cheryl Donegan, have two sons, Finnegan (1999) and Cassius (2005). He divides his time between Istria County, Croatia and Long Island.

Works

Fiction, Poetry

• No. 110 10.4.93-10.7.93, Lodz: Artists Museum, 1993, PDF. Chapbook.

• with Joan La Barbara, 73 Poems, Permanent Press, 1994. [1]

• No. 109 2.7.93-12.15.93, New York: Bravin Post Lee, 1994, [14] pp, PDF. Chapbook.

• No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1997, 606 pp, HTML, PDFs: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

• Soliloquy, New York: Bravin Post Lee, 1997, 281 pp, (edition of 50); new ed., New York: Granary Books, 2001, 487 pp, HTML, PDF, HTML.

• Gertrude Stein on Punctuation, Newton, NJ: Abaton Books, 1999, PDF. Chapbook.

• 6799, zingmagazine, 2000, 92 pp, PDF.

• Fidget, Toronto: Coach House, 2000, 107 pp, Applet, HTML.
  • Inquieto, trans. Carlos Bueno Vera, intro. Esteban Pujals, afterw. Marjorie Perloff, Segovia La Uña Rota, 2014, 159 pp. (Spanish)

• Head Citations, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2002, 88 pp, HTML. Review: Fama.

• Day, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2003, 836 pp, PDF, PDF. [2]. Reviews: Ford, Nufer (Muse Apprentice Guild), Stefans, Raven (Bomb), Goode (Gig), Rubinstein (Art in America).

• The Weather: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Los Angeles: Make Now, 2005, 120 pp. Reviews: Levine (Bookforum), Huppatz, Zultanski (Rain Taxi), Wershler (PoMo Cult).

• Traffic, Los Angeles: Make Now, 2007, 115 pp, HTML, PDF. Reviews: Huppatz, Zultanski (Rain Taxi), Perloff, Wershler (PoMo Cult).

• All The Numbers From Numbers, /ubu Editions, 2008, 21 pp, PDF.

• Sports, Los Angeles: Make Now, 2008, PDF. Reviews: Thomson (Dazed&Confused), Fama, Huppatz, Zultanski (Rain Taxi), Wershler (PoMo Cult).

• Seven American Deaths and Disasters, New York: powerHouse Books, 2013, 176 pp, Log, EPUB.

• Theory, Paris: Jean Boîte, 2015, 500 pp, Log, PDF.
  • Théorie, trans. Léa Faust, Paris: Jean Boîte, 2015, 500 pp, Log, PDF. (French)

• Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century, Verso, 2015, 928 pp, EPUB, ARG. Publisher. [3]

Nonfiction

• editor, I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004, EPUB.
  • Interviews mit Andy Warhol, intro. Klaus Theweleit, trans. Susanne Höbel, Kippenheim: Liebig, 2005, 381 pp. (German)
  • Entretiens: 1962-1987, trans. Alain Cueff, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2006, 405 pp. (French)
  • Będę twoim lustrem: wywiady z Warholem, trans. Marcin Zawada, Warsaw: Twój Styl, 2006, 391 pp. (Polish)
  • Wo jiang shi ni de jing zi: An di wo huo er fang tan lu [我将是你的镜子: 安迪沃霍尔访谈录], Beijing: San lian shu dian, 2007, 463 pp; repr., Guangxi Normal University Press, 2022. (Chinese)
  • Entrevistas: 1962-1987: treinta y siete entrevistas con el maestro del pop, intro. Reva Wolf, afterw. Wayne Koestenbaum, trans. Ferran Esteve, Barcelona: Blackie Books, 2010, 559 pp. (Spanish)

• Letter To Bettina Funcke / Brief an Bettina Funcke, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011, 35 pp. (English)/(German)

• editor, with Craig Dworkin, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2011, Log, PDF.

• Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, Log, EPUB, HTML.
  • Escritura no-creativa: la gestión del lenguaje en la era digital, intro. Reinaldo Laddaga, trans. Alan Page, Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015, 331 pp. Excerpt. (Spanish)
  • Uncreative Writing. Sprachmanagement im digitalen Zeitalter, trans. Hannes Bajohr and Swantje Lichtenstein, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2017, 351 pp, ARG. Enlarged edition. Publisher. (German)
  • L'écriture sans écriture: du langage à l'âge numérique, trans. François Bon, Paris: Jean Boîte, 2018, 248 pp. Publisher. [4] (French)
  • CTRL+C, CTRL+V – Scrittura non creativa, Rome: Nero, 2019, 288 pp, PDF, EPUB. Publisher. (Italian)

• Je ne me tourne vers la théorie qu’après avoir réalisé que quelqu’un a consacré toute sa vie à une question qui m’avait à peine traversé l’esprit jusqu’alors, trans. Nicolas Garait, Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2013, 68 pp. Audio. [5] [6] [7] (English)/(French)

• Against Translation: Displacement Is the New Translation, Paris: Jean Boîte, 2016, 8 x 32 pp. 8 books in a box. Publisher. (English),(French),(Spanish),(German),(Chinese),(Japanese),(Russian),(Arabic)

• Wasting Time on the Internet: The Art of Mindless Surfing, HarperCollins, 2016, 224 pp, EPUB, AZW3. Publisher. Review: Nygård (Kunstkritikk).
  • Perdere tempo su internet, trans. Luca Bianco, Torino: Einaudi, 2017, 192 pp, EPUB. Publisher. (Italian)
  • Ru he bu zai wang shang xu du ren sheng [如何不在网上虚度人生], trans. Chang Liu (刘畅), Beijing, 2017, xxviii+215 pp. (Chinese)

• The PXL-MAD Lectures, eds. Arne De Winde, Evelin Brosi and Kris Latoir, Ghent: Het Balanseer, 2017, 100 pp. Publisher.

• The Ideal Lecture (In Memory of David Antin), Ghent: Het Balanseer, 2018, 62 pp, Log, PDF. Publisher.

• Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020, x+318 pp, Log, EPUB.
  • Patrimoine pirate. Archives, circulations et polémiques artistiques à l’âge numérique, trans. Lionel Ruffel and Stéphane Vanderhaeghe, comm. Jacopo Rasmi, Paris: JBE Books, 2023, 304 pp. Publisher. (French)

More texts

Artist's books, miscellanea

• Kenneth Goldsmith Annotates 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' by Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Marginalia, 2018, 72 pp. [8]

• Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (The Green Box), [1934] 2018. Bootleg edition. [9]

• One Square Kilometer (for Walter De Maria), Aarea.co, 2018, 2568 pp. [10] [11] [12]

• editor, 1000 Infrathins, University of Pennsylvania, 2018, 121 pp, Log.

• I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness, London: Eris, 2018, 148 pp; 2nd ed., 2023, 148 pp. A collection of sixty-two new artworks inspired by Wittgenstein's Tractatus. [13]

• Hillary: The Hillary Clinton Emails, ed. Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Rome: Nero, 2019, 400+12 pp. Publisher.

• NYC Street Poets and Visionaries, Paris: JBE Books, 2023, 493 pp.

Recent art projects

• Printing Out the Internet, LABOR, Mexico City, May 2013.

• Uncontested Spaces: Guerilla Readings, MoMA Galleries, Jan-Jun 2013. As part of Goldsmith's Poet Laureate program, writers were invited to choose works in MoMA's collection, develop a response, and then select a space in the Museum galleries in which to perform the resulting readings and texts. Participants included David Shields, Sheila Heti, Rick Moody, John Zorn, Stefan Sagmeister, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, Maira Kalman, Heidi Julavits, Alex Ross, Vito Acconci, and others. Every Friday, from January to July 2013, Goldsmith himself contributed readings in the galleries.

• JSTOR Pirate Headquarters, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Apr-Aug 2014. 250,000 pages of pirated JSTOR documents (a cache of papers from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society made available via The Pirate Bay) were printed in tribute to suicided information activist Aaron Swartz. Part of the Smart New World exhibition. [14] [15] [16]

• HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, Despar Teatro Italia, Venice, May-Nov 2019. Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. [17]

• Retyping a Library, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Jun-Aug 2022. Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and Anne Hilde Neset.

Interviews

• A.S. Bessa, "Exchanging emails with Kenneth Goldsmith: an Interview", zingmagazine, Winter 2000.

• Erik Belgum, "Kenneth Goldsmith Interview", Read Me 4, ed. Gary Sullivan, Winter/Spring 2001. [18]

• Marjorie Perloff, "Uma conversa com Kenneth Goldsmith", Sibila 2:3, Oct 2002, pp 139-158, HTML. (Brazilian Portuguese)
  • "A Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith", Jacket 21, Feb 2003, HTML, HTML.

• Leevi Lehto, "Nude Media, or Benjamin in the Age of Ubiquitous Connectivity", Tuli & Savu, Nov 2002.
  • "Alaston media eli Benjamin 'kaikkien keskinäisyhteyden' ajassa", Tuli & Savu, Nov 2002, PDF. (Finnish)

• Anne Henochowicz, "Petty Theft: Kenny G Gives A's for Unoriginality", The Daily Pennsylvanian, 18 Nov 2004. [19]

• Brian Hanrahan, "Kenneth Goldsmith Interview", Art Attack, WKCR (NYC) radio, Mar 2005, 30 min. Audio.

• Ben Baumes, "What Else Can This Thing Do? An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith on Radio Practices", Repellent Magazine, Brooklyn, NY, 2005.

• John Jourden, "UbuWeb Vu: Kenneth Goldsmith", Archinect, 26 Jun 2007. Interview.

• Mike Pesca, Rachel Martin, "'Uncreative Writer' Retypes the New York Times", NPR, 5 Jun 2008. Audio.

• Jason McBride, "Copy Cat: Poet Kenneth Goldsmith encourages his students to plagiarize", Toronto Life, Jul 2008.

• "Lonely Christopher in Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith", The Corresponding Society, 10 Oct 2008.

• Sarah Posman, "Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, Yang, Antwerp, Feb 2006.

• Kareem Estefan, "American Trilogist: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith", Rain Taxi, Fall 2008.

• " The Tortoise And The Hare: Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries", Jacket 38, Late 2009.

• Geir Haraldseth, "The Robin Hood of the Avant-Garde" / "Avantgardens Robin Hood", Kunstkritikk, 2 Mar 2011. (English)/(Norwegian)

• Thomas Baumgartner, "Vendredi hors-série #22 - Kenneth Goldsmith, fondateur d'UbuWeb", Les Passagers de la nuit, Radio France Culture, 25 Mar 2011, 30 min. Audio.

• Poets.org, "'Against Expression': Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation", Jun 2011.

• "Kenneth Goldsmith Talks to Nadja Romain", TANK 7:2, Summer 2011, PDF.

• Dave Mandl, "Interview: Kenneth Goldsmith", The Believer 9:8, Oct 2011, PDF.

• Maria Farràs, "“Archiving is a new folk art”. Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith", CCCB Lab, Apr 2012, 6 min. Video.

• Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, "Memorabilia. Collecting Sounds with... Kenneth Goldsmith. Part I", Part II, Radio Web MACBA, 12 Jul 2012, 48 & 10 min. Audio.

• Cornelia Sollfrank, "The Poetry of Archiving, Kenneth Goldsmith", 2013, 21 min. Video. Part of the Giving What You Dont Have project.

• Wes del Val, "UbuWeb’s Kenneth Goldsmith Takes Us into his Personal Library of Babel", 032c, 11 Mar 2015.

• Menachem Feuer, "Ubu Yorker: Berfrois Interviews Kenneth Goldsmith", Berfrois, 15 Sep 2017.

• "Son(i)a 250: Kenneth Goldsmith", Radio Web MACBA, Barcelona, 12 Dec 2017, 37 min. Audio.

• Peter Gonda, "Básník Kenneth Goldsmith: Poezie nemůže udělat vůbec nic a v tom spočívá její krása", Radio Wave, Prague, 4 Feb 2019, 16 min. Audio and text. (Czech)

• Vincenzo Santarcangelo, "Readymade Writing. Kenneth Goldsmith on plagiarism, citation, publishing, archive fever and printing out the internet", NERO, 26 Nov 2019.

• Leonardo Villa-Forte, Lucas Murari, "O texto nas malhas digitais e uma revisão da Escrita Conceitual – entrevista com Kenneth Goldsmith", Revista Eco-Pós 24:3, Feb 2022, pp 319-324. (Brazilian Portuguese)

Documentary films

• Sucking on Words: Kenneth Goldsmith, dir. Simon Morris, 2007, 60 min. Script.

• Context is the New Content, PBS, 2018, 6 min.

On Kenneth Goldsmith

• Marjorie Perloff, "'Vocable Scriptsigns': Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget", in Goldsmith, Fidget, Toronto: Coach House, 2000, pp 90-107.

• "Kenneth Goldsmith", in Contemporary Poets, 8th ed., St. James Press, 2000.

• Tan Lin, "Information Archives, the De-Materialization of Language, and Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget and No.111 2.7.93-10.20.96", Shark Magazine, Dec 2002.

• Stephen Cain, "Goldsmith, Kenneth (1961-)", in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, 2005. [20]

• Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 12(7): "Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics", eds. Barbara Cole and Lori Emerson, Strathroy, ON, Fall 2005, 172 pp, HTML, HTML. [21]
  • Marjorie Perloff, "‘Moving Information’: On Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather", Open Letter 12:7, Fall 2005, pp 85-95.

• Craig Dworkin, "The Imaginary Solution", Contemporary Literature 48:1, 2007, pp 29-60.

• Christopher Schmidt, "The Waste-Management Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith", SubStance 116, 37:2, 2008, pp 25-40.

• Radkhika Jones, "Uncreative Writing", Bookforum, Jun/Jul/Aug 2008.

• Jed Rasula, "From Corset to Podcast: The Question of Poetry Now", American Literary History 21:3, 2009.

• Marjorie Perloff, "Conceptual Bridges, Digital Tunnels: Kenneth Goldsmith's Traffic", ch. 7 in Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp 146-166.
  • "Pontes conceituais/tuneis digitais. Traffic, de Kenneth Goldsmith", trans. Adriano Scandolara, in Perloff, O gênio não original: Poesia por outros meios no novo século, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2013. (Brazilian Portuguese)

• Miguel Conde, "A vanguarda da pilhagem. No maior site de arte experimental na web, a ordem é roubar primeiro e resolver depois", O Globo, Rio de Janiero, 26 Mar 2011, pp 1-2. (Brazilian Portuguese)

• Robert Archambeau, "Kenneth Goldsmith, or The Art of Being Talked About", Samizdat Blog, Apr 2011.

• Barrett Watten, "Presentism and Periodization in Language Writing, Conceptual Art, and Conceptual Writing", Journal of Narrative Theory 41:1, Spring 2011, pp 125-157.

• Vanessa Place, "The Death of the Text: Kenneth Goldsmith at the White House", Harriet Blog, 19 May 2011.

• American Book Review 32(4): "Focus: Uncreative Writing: What Are You Calling Art?", ed. Doug Nufer, May/Jun 2011, PDFs.

• Marjorie Perloff, "Towards a Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context", Jacket2, 28 Jul 2011. An analysis of Goldsmith’s 2011 performance at the White House.

• Katherine Schulten, "Poetry Pairing, Crystalline Weather", The New York Times, 1 Sep 2011.

• Julie Xie, "Penn Professor Encourages Plagiarism", The Daily Pennsylvanian, 13 Oct 2011.

• Jacquelyn Ardam, "The ABCs of Conceptual Writing", Comparative Literature Studies 51:1, 2014, pp 132-158.

• Katy Waldman, "Frontiers of the Stuplime", Slate, 27 Apr 2015.

• Alec Wilkinson, "Something Borrowed", The New Yorker, 5 Oct 2015.

• Cornelia Sollfrank, "Nothing New Needs to be Created. Kenneth Goldsmith’s Claim to Uncreativity", in No Internet – No Art: A Lunch Byte Anthology, eds. Melanie Bühler and Goethe Institut Washington, Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2015.

• Leonard Villa-Forte, "O autor como apropriador", Serrote 23, Aug 2016. (Brazilian Portuguese)

• Darren Wershler, "Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation", in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics , eds. Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, Duke University Press, 2017. [22]

• Daniel Morris, Kenneth Goldsmith's Recent Works on Paper: Exactly Wrong, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019, 200 pp.

• Gill Partington, "Kontext ist alles. Kenneth Goldsmith und UbuWeb", Merkur 866, Jul 2021, pp 59-66. [23] (German)

• Sara Massafra, "Il linguaggio come materialità combinatoria nello spazio poetico: dall’Oulipo all’Ubuweb", Configurazioni 1:1, Dec 2022, pp 130-151. [24] (Italian)

• more

See also

• UbuWeb

Links

• Twitter
• Works on UbuWeb
• Profile on EPC
• Kenny G's Hour of Pain, show on WFMU, 1995-2014
• Profile on U Penn
• Profile at the Academy of American Poets
• Printing Out the Internet on KnowYourMeme