Quotes from Kenneth Goldsmith

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.

The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don't even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here's every word I spoke for a week. Here's a year's worth of weather reports... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.

You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I'm telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren't reading it.

Instagram something with the intention of it being taken down by Instagram. Take a screenshot of it; keep a record of it. Instagram the screenshot. Screenshot that Instagram. If it is taken down again, repeat the process until all you're posting is a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot . . . of the original photo.

The role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.

Take the tech blog Boing Boing, for instance. They're one of the most visible blogs on the web, but they create very little original content. Rather they act as a filter for the morass of information, pulling up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing they're linking to. The culture of citation and name-checking on the web has resulted in a cascade of "re-" gestures: retweeting, reblogging, regramming, and reposting

No fue sino hasta que sucumbimos ante la tentación que pudimos tomar conciencia de la insensatez de nuestros deseos

If I thought I was only doing one thing—running—I would be naïve. Even in my leisure, when strapped to a web-enabled device, I'm furiously multitasking and, in a very positive way, highly distracted.

In Flusserian terms, it doesn't really matter what we tweet (content); it just matters that we keep tweeting (apparatus). For Flusser, the content of any medium is always the series of apparatuses that produced it.

W: You sound like that man on the Times who considers my paintings to be sociological commentary. I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don't try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary. Sociological critics are waste makers.

Your photo of the Eiffel Tower on Flickr is identically redundant to the millions already stored on Flickr, yet you keep on snapping them (just as I keep downloading MP3s).

The beauty of the Internet is that people can take things, and do what they want with them, to project what they want or feel.

For the past decade, art historians Hito Steyerl and Boris Groys have written in favor of "weak images," claiming that in the digital age, a weak or cool artifact is more democratic than a strong or hot one.

It's not plagiarism in the digital age -- it's repurposing.

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.

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

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