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 GoldsmithThe 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 GoldsmithI'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 GoldsmithNew 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 GoldsmithEveryone 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 GoldsmithMy 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