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Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith (born June 4, 1961) is an American poet, conceptual artist, and editor recognized for pioneering uncreative writing, a practice that involves transcribing or appropriating existing materials such as weather reports, traffic updates, and personal speech rather than inventing original content.^[1]^[2] After studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and earning a BFA in 1984, Goldsmith shifted from visual arts to language-based works, authoring over ten books of poetry including Fidget (2000), a minute-by-minute record of his bodily movements; Soliloquy (2001), a transcription of his spoken words over one week; Day (2003), a full retyping of the September 1, 2000, edition of The New York Times; and the "American trilogy" comprising The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008).^[1]^[3] Goldsmith founded UbuWeb in 1996, establishing it as a comprehensive online repository of avant-garde art, including poetry, film, sound, and historical documents otherwise difficult to access, which operates without institutional funding and emphasizes free distribution of out-of-print materials.^[1]^[2] He also serves as a senior editor of PennSound, an audio archive of poetry readings, and hosts a weekly radio program on WFMU, while teaching writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where his methods challenge conventional notions of creativity in the digital age.^[2]^[4] His conceptual approaches, which treat language as raw material akin to objects in visual art, have influenced discussions on authorship and originality but also generated controversy, most notably in 2015 when he performed The Body of Michael Brown, an edited version of the Ferguson shooting victim's autopsy report presented as poetry; Goldsmith defended the piece as an exploration of unfiltered documentary language, though it drew accusations of racial insensitivity from some literary circles amid post-Ferguson tensions.^[5]^[6]^[7]

Early Life and Education

Childhood and Formative Influences

Kenneth Goldsmith was born on June 4, 1961, in Freeport, New York, a town on Long Island.^[8] His family background involved the garment industry, with his parents, Ted and Judy Goldsmith, raising him in the suburban setting of Port Washington, Long Island, where he attended local schools.^[9] ^[10] This middle-class suburban milieu, characterized by routine domesticity and proximity to urban media hubs, exposed him to the banal rhythms of everyday American life in the 1960s and 1970s, including pervasive radio broadcasts and television programming that saturated household entertainment.^[5] Goldsmith's Jewish heritage featured contrasting familial strains: a paternal lineage tied to mercantile success, exemplified by his grandfather Irving Goldsmith's management of Bromleigh Coats (an anglicized form of the original family name Bromley), and a maternal side marked by intellectual ambition turned hardship, as his grandfather Finkelstein (later Field) transitioned from lawyer to penniless rent collector after failed investments in Cuban sugarcane.^[5] These stories of name changes and economic reversals introduced early themes of inauthenticity and mechanical adaptation in identity, predating any formal artistic pursuits. His parents' embrace of New Age spirituality further shaped a household environment blending eclectic beliefs with detachment from conventional religious narratives.^[11] In high school, Goldsmith displayed early inclinations toward nonconformity, pursuing interests in art alongside experimental drug use, such as taking his SATs under the influence of LSD, which reflected a rejection of standardized emotional or creative expression in favor of observational detachment.^[5] This period's immersion in media-saturated suburbia—where television and radio delivered scripted, reproduced content—laid groundwork for later preoccupations with transcription and found materials, emphasizing empirical capture of the mundane over invented narrative.^[5]

Academic Training in Visual Arts

Goldsmith initially attended New York University from 1979 to 1980 and Parsons School of Design from 1980 to 1981 before enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1981, where he pursued training in visual arts.^[8] He began in the Ceramics department but transferred to Sculpture, deeming clay's expressive constraints insufficient for his emerging interests.^[12] Goldsmith completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Sculpture in 1984.^[1]^[13] RISD's curriculum during this period emphasized practical, hands-on object production, with Goldsmith later describing the institution as anti-intellectual and oriented toward outsider and folk art traditions.^[14] In response, his sculptural experiments gravitated toward conceptual, object-based methods, including aleatoric arrangements of cast objects into unstable "piles" to investigate spatial perception and information density.^[12] These involved incorporating found materials and assembling disparate elements without prioritizing original fabrication, revealing early encounters with the boundaries of invention in physical media.^[12] Such practices underscored a preference for recontextualizing existing forms over expressive creation, as Goldsmith stacked and repositioned ready-made components to generate new perceptual effects rather than crafting novel objects from primary materials.^[12] This material handling approach during his training prefigured broader realizations about the limits of authorship in visual work, though confined to sculptural contexts at the time.^[12]

Transition to Conceptual Practices

Initial Visual Art Career

Goldsmith commenced his professional career as a visual artist in the 1980s, following his training at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he specialized in sculpture.^[15] His initial mature body of work consisted of large-scale text-based sculptures, featuring words carved into plexiglass and integrated with neon elements to highlight language as a tangible, illuminated form.^[16] These pieces treated textual content mechanically, prioritizing the replication and manipulation of existing linguistic material over novel invention, akin to industrial processes of reproduction.^[5] Throughout the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, Goldsmith produced installations and objects that experimented with mechanical alterations, such as audio transcriptions rendered visually or printed texts reconfigured into sculptural forms, testing the boundaries of authorship through constraint-based systems.^[17] However, the physical demands of these media—requiring costly fabrication in materials like plexiglass and neon—proved prohibitive for sustained production and market viability, as galleries and collectors favored more affordable formats.^[16] This realization underscored the limitations of visual art's materiality, which constrained scalability compared to language's potential for infinite, cost-free duplication in reproducible mediums like print and, later, digital text.^[3] By the early 1990s, these practical barriers prompted Goldsmith to pivot toward verbal practices, where conceptual constraints could achieve similar effects without physical overhead.^[16]

Founding UbuWeb and Archival Turn

In 1996, Kenneth Goldsmith founded UbuWeb as a personal website to address the scarcity of online resources for avant-garde materials, beginning with uploads of hard-to-find concrete poetry during the web's nascent phase.^[18] The initiative stemmed from observed gaps in digital preservation and distribution of experimental works, prompting Goldsmith to aggregate texts, films, and sounds without initial permissions, prioritizing immediate accessibility over legal formalities.^[19] This approach reflected a deliberate rejection of proprietary barriers, enabling unmediated public exposure to materials often marginalized by commercial or institutional controls.^[20] UbuWeb evolved into a comprehensive, uncurated repository by aggregating diverse experimental content across poetry, visual arts, film, and sound, eschewing selective curation in favor of exhaustive open-access compilation.^[21] By the late 2000s, it hosted works by over 5,000 artists and thousands of items, sustained through Goldsmith's role as senior editor without reliance on advertisements, donations, or formal funding.^[19] This growth underscored its function as a shadow archive, circumventing traditional gatekeeping to facilitate direct engagement with obscure avant-garde artifacts previously limited to physical or paywalled collections.^[22] The project's archival turn signified Goldsmith's pivot toward digital preservation as a conceptual practice, influencing broader models of online art distribution by demonstrating the viability of permissionless aggregation for cultural democratization.^[23] Its empirical reach includes serving as the largest non-profit online archive of such materials, with sustained operations fostering scholarly access and inspiring parallel initiatives in experimental media without institutional oversight.^[24]^[25]

Conceptual Poetics and Uncreative Writing

Philosophical Foundations

Goldsmith's uncreative writing paradigm posits that the digital era's abundance of information renders traditional notions of originality and authorship obsolete, shifting artistic value toward the management and recontextualization of pre-existing data. In his 2011 book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, he argues that endless access to language via the internet eliminates the imperative for invention, as creators must instead navigate overload by appropriating and reframing materials to generate meaning.^[26] This approach treats language as a commodity akin to other digital resources, where the act of selection and repositioning—rather than origination—constitutes the core creative labor.^[27] Central to this philosophy are influences from Marcel Duchamp's readymades, John Cage's chance-based compositions, and Andy Warhol's repetitive appropriations, which Goldsmith adapts to literary contexts by viewing language as inert material detached from authorial emotion or personal narrative. Duchamp's elevation of everyday objects challenged artistic production norms, a principle Goldsmith extends to textual "found" elements, emphasizing conceptual framing over expressive content.^[28] Cage's embrace of indeterminacy and Warhol's mechanical reproduction inform Goldsmith's rejection of romantic individualism, positing instead that art emerges from procedural constraints that neutralize subjective intervention.^[16]^[29] Empirically, digital technologies underpin this framework by facilitating practices such as verbatim transcription and algorithmic sourcing, which expose creativity as a skill of curation rather than innate genius. Goldsmith contends that tools like search engines and databases democratize access to vast corpora, enabling constraint-driven methods that prioritize efficiency and iteration over invention, thus countering myths of solitary inspiration sustained by pre-digital scarcity.^[30] This causal shift from resource limitation to surplus reorients poetics toward forensic assembly, where the artist's role is diagnostic—parsing and redistributing information flows—rather than generative from within.^[27]

Core Methods and Techniques

Goldsmith's primary techniques center on transcription, whereby he meticulously records extended segments of spoken or printed language from everyday sources, such as radio broadcasts or reports, often capturing a full day's worth without any editing or summarization to replicate the unfiltered temporal flow.^[31] This method enforces verbatim capture, emphasizing the mechanical labor of retyping or noting every utterance, pause, or repetition inherent in ambient communications like traffic updates or announcements.^[32] Complementing transcription, appropriation involves full-text copying of existing documents, such as newspapers, executed through manual retyping of every letter and word to maintain absolute fidelity.^[32] Central to both is a rigorous constraint system: self-imposed rules mandating "no fudging," alterations, cut-and-paste shortcuts, or interpretive skewing, which transform tedium and scale into deliberate methodological features that resist creative intervention.^[32] These constraints stem from direct empirical engagement with language's prolific, unaltered presence in media-saturated environments, underscoring its availability as raw material rather than requiring original generation. This practice diverges from plagiarism through explicit foregrounding of sources and processes, eschewing concealment or false attribution in favor of conceptual transparency that prompts scrutiny of authorship, digital reproducibility, and the erosion of traditional originality in an era of abundant, repurposable data.^[30] By openly declaring the appropriated origins, the techniques invite meta-analysis of how mechanical reproduction challenges conventional notions of textual ownership and value.^[33]

Major Literary Works

Goldsmith's early conceptual poetry includes Fidget (2000), a transcription of every movement made by his body over thirteen hours on June 16, 1997 (Bloomsday), from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., published by Coach House Books.^[34] This followed his 1993 book 73 Poems and built on techniques from No. 111 (1997), earning initial notice in literary reviews for its exhaustive documentation.^[35] Soliloquy (2001), published by Granary Books in a 281-page edition, records every word spoken by Goldsmith during one week in April 1996, originally debuted as a 1997 text installation; it received attention for capturing unedited personal speech patterns.^[36] In his middle period, Day (2003), issued by The Figures in an edition of 750 copies, retranscribes the entire September 1, 2000, issue of The New York Times, page by page, preserving all text including ads and errors; Publishers Weekly noted its extreme transcription approach upon release.^[37] The Weather (2005), from Make Now Press, compiles one year of transcribed radio weather forecasts from December 21, 2002, to December 20, 2003, broadcast in the New York area, continuing Goldsmith's found-text method.^[38] The "American trilogy" comprises Traffic (2007) and Sports (2008), both from Make Now Press. Traffic transcribes traffic reports from a New York radio station at ten-minute intervals over 24 hours during a holiday weekend in 2006.^[39] Sports records the full radio broadcast of the longest nine-inning Major League Baseball game on record, a 2004 Chicago White Sox-Cleveland Indians matchup lasting over four hours.^[40] A later work, Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), published by powerHouse Books, transcribes unedited radio and television news reports of seven U.S. tragedies from 1963 to 2005, including the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon, as well as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster; The New York Times reviewed it as a raw archival rendering of media responses to events.^[41]^[42]

Performances, Broadcasts, and Collaborations

Radio and Live Events

Goldsmith hosted a weekly radio show on WFMU from 1996 to 2009 under the pseudonym Kenny G, presenting unedited segments of ambient talk radio, weather reports, and other found audio as conceptual interventions in broadcasting.^[43] The program, often titled "Hour of Pain," captured and replayed raw, mechanical language streams without alteration or commentary, treating them as autonomous poetic material to expose the non-expressive, procedural flow of public discourse.^[44] In live events, Goldsmith performed readings of his transcription projects, reciting verbatim captures of real-time phenomena such as bodily movements or urban announcements to emphasize language's detachment from authorial intent and its basis in empirical recording.^[5] These performances repurposed ongoing broadcasts—like traffic updates—into durational recitations, underscoring the causal mechanics of everyday verbal data over traditional poetic invention.^[11] A notable instance occurred on May 11, 2011, during President Obama's "A Celebration of Poetry in the White House," where Goldsmith read from Traffic (2007), a full transcription of one day's New York City traffic reports, delivering the mechanical patter of delays and directions to an audience including the First Lady.^[45] This event exemplified his approach of elevating banal, time-bound announcements to art through faithful documentation rather than creative reimagining.^[5]

Interdisciplinary Projects

Goldsmith edited I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews in 2004, compiling thirty-seven conversations from 1962 to 1987 that intersect Warhol's visual artistry with transcribed language, revealing the pop artist's sphinx-like persona through unfiltered dialogues on fame, consumerism, and cultural production.^[46] This project extended conceptual practices by repurposing archival audio and print interviews as a textual artifact, bridging visual pop art legacies with Goldsmith's emphasis on appropriation without alteration.^[47] In 1993, Goldsmith collaborated with avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara on 73 Poems, a multimedia work combining his concrete poetry—featuring word and number constellations—with La Barbara's extended vocal techniques, produced as both a book and CD to fuse linguistic structures with sonic performance.^[48] The project drew from text-sound traditions, treating poems as modular scores for vocal improvisation, aligning with anti-originality by layering pre-existing poetic forms over improvised audio.^[49] Goldsmith's 2013 initiative Printing Out the Internet functioned as a distributed conceptual installation, issuing an open call on May 22 for global participants to print arbitrary web content, yielding over ten tons of physical output exhibited in galleries like Labor in Mexico City, materializing digital sampling as tangible, site-specific archives that critique data ephemerality through collective appropriation.^[50]^[51] This collaborative effort echoed UbuWeb's archival ethos but emphasized physical instantiation of internet text and images, involving artists and non-artists in a shared rejection of digital originality.^[52]

Academic Career and Pedagogy

Teaching Positions

Goldsmith joined the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s, teaching creative writing and poetics courses that incorporated constraint-based and uncreative approaches to composition.^[53] ^[54] Specific offerings include "Uncreative Writing" in Fall 2012, Fall 2014, and Spring 2017; "Duchamp is My Lawyer" in Fall 2020; "Experimental Writing" in Spring 2023; and "AI Creative Writing" scheduled for Spring 2026.^[53] He also serves as senior editor of PennSound, the university's digital poetry archive, supporting archival and auditory pedagogy in these institutional contexts.^[53] ^[55] These roles at Penn enabled Goldsmith to conduct workshops and classes promoting techniques such as verbatim transcription and data repurposing as compositional constraints, as documented in course listings and his instructional materials.^[53] ^[32] For instance, the "Uncreative Writing" syllabus emphasized managing found language under strict procedural limits to challenge traditional authorship.^[53]

Influence on Students and Curriculum

Goldsmith introduced the "Uncreative Writing" course at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, where students were penalized for originality and rewarded for verbatim copying, appropriation, and mechanical reproduction of existing texts.^[27] This approach enforced constraints such as retyping five pages from any document without alteration or transcribing audio clips using standardized notations for pauses and inflections, producing outputs centered on empirical replication rather than subjective invention.^[27] Assignments like purchasing a term paper from an online service, signing it as one's own, and defending it in class further emphasized reframing found language over personal expression, training students in data curation amid digital text abundance.^[27] These methods demonstrably shifted student practices toward constraint-based production, as evidenced by projects such as a University of Pennsylvania student's 2012 retyping of Jack Kerouac's entire On the Road—a 21-day endeavor documented via video—to dissect stylistic patterns through rote labor.^[56] Other examples include transcriptions of media like Project Runway episodes, which highlighted vocal nuances via symbols, and repurposed screenplays derived from video sources, fostering skills in mechanical transcription over emotive narrative.^[27] Such exercises yielded verifiable textual artifacts, prioritizing quantity and process—e.g., public domain copying or Wikipedia micro-edits—over interpretive flair, with students reporting renewed engagement through deepened textual analysis.^[27] The pedagogy challenged entrenched creative writing curricula by de-emphasizing sincerity and autobiographical disclosure, which Goldsmith critiqued as relics unsuited to an era of algorithmic language flows, instead cultivating proficiency in sourcing, reframing, and managing vast data sets akin to information professionals.^[27] This countered norms favoring personal testimony—often amplified in academic settings toward identity-centric outputs—by enforcing neutral replication, such as graffiti deployments of appropriated texts or greeting cards from verbatim snippets, to reveal causal effects of context on meaning without authorial bias.^[27] Students emerged with altered perceptions of authorship as performative selection, equipping them for digital-era tasks like content aggregation over confessional modes.^[27]

Recognition and Critical Reception

Awards and Honors

In 2013, Goldsmith was appointed the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a position recognizing his innovative approaches to poetry and language in contemporary art contexts.^[57]^[4] On May 11, 2011, he participated in "A Celebration of Poetry in the White House" hosted by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, where he performed a reading of transcribed traffic reports as conceptual poetry.^[45] Goldsmith received the NEA/Mid Atlantic Visual Arts Fellowship in sculpture in 1988, supporting his early work as a visual artist before his focus shifted toward poetic and archival projects.^[58] In September 2024, he was awarded the Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou International Award for Literature, honoring his contributions to experimental writing and the preservation of avant-garde materials through UbuWeb.^[59] He has also been recognized with the Governor's Arts Award for Media from a state arts council and various artist grants, including from Artists Space in 1985.^[60]^[58]

Positive Assessments of Contributions

Literary critic Marjorie Perloff has lauded Kenneth Goldsmith's conceptual projects for embodying "unoriginal genius," a poetics that redefines authorship by prioritizing appropriation and conceptual framing over original composition, drawing parallels to Marcel Duchamp's readymades where the idea eclipses execution.^[61] In her 2010 book Unoriginal Genius, Perloff analyzes Goldsmith's Traffic (2007), a transcription of 24 hours of New York City traffic reports, as a "vivid representation of contemporary urban life in all its ritual, boredom, nervousness, frustration, fear, apathy—and also its pleasure," demonstrating how constraint-based transcription disrupts conventional lyricism and reveals the surreal rhythms of mediated information flow.^[61] This approach, she argues, challenges readers' habits by presenting "poetry that doesn’t look like any poetry we’ve seen, presented as ‘unreadable’ so as to challenge us to read it," thereby empirically shifting poetry from analog introspection to digital-era management of abundant data.^[61] Publishers Weekly has commended Goldsmith's oeuvre as "some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry," attributing to him innovations in treating language as a found object amid the digital deluge.^[2] In its review of Day (2003), a verbatim record of The New York Times from September 1, 2002, the publication noted that Goldsmith "has gone further in exploring language-as-found-object than any other artist or writer," emphasizing his role in pioneering uncreative practices that harness informational overload to redefine poetic form and authorship boundaries between poetry and prose. These assessments underscore Goldsmith's causal influence in adapting poetry to digital paradigms, where constraint and appropriation foster new modes of composition responsive to the fluidity of online and broadcast language streams.

Controversies and Criticisms

The 2015 Michael Brown Performance

On March 13, 2015, during the Interrupt 3 conference at Brown University's Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Kenneth Goldsmith presented a performance piece titled "The Body of Michael Brown."^[62]^[6] The work consisted of Goldsmith reading aloud an edited version of the official St. Louis County autopsy report on Michael Brown, the 18-year-old Black man fatally shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014.^[62]^[63] The autopsy report, publicly released by St. Louis County officials in late August 2014, detailed Brown's injuries, including six gunshot wounds, with specifics on entry and exit points, organ damage, and toxicology findings such as marijuana in his system.^[62] Goldsmith made minimal alterations to the document's language, primarily substituting "the body" with "Michael Brown" throughout and rearranging certain descriptive passages for rhythmic effect in the oral delivery.^[62]^[6] The performance lasted approximately 15-20 minutes, with Goldsmith delivering the text in a measured, performative style typical of his conceptual readings.^[64] During the reading, several audience members, including students and attendees at the conference focused on digital culture and interruption in media, exited the room in protest midway through.^[65]^[64] Post-reading discussions at the event turned confrontational, with some participants voicing immediate objections to the graphic content and perceived exploitation of Brown's death amid ongoing national debates over police violence.^[65] No official video recording of the performance was publicly released by organizers, though eyewitness accounts described the room's tension and Goldsmith's continuation despite interruptions.^[62] Brown University did not issue an immediate institutional statement, but the event's fallout prompted rapid online dissemination of descriptions and partial excerpts via social media and attendee reports.^[6]^[63]

Accusations of Insensitivity and Broader Debates

Critics in the poetry and art communities accused Goldsmith of racial insensitivity and exploiting the trauma of Michael Brown's death for artistic gain, arguing that a white poet's reframing of the 18-year-old Black teenager's autopsy report—obtained from public records following the August 9, 2014, Ferguson shooting—as a performance piece constituted a further dehumanization amid ongoing protests against police violence.^[6]^[62] This backlash intensified in the Black Lives Matter era, with detractors claiming the reading ignored the raw grief of affected communities and prioritized conceptual detachment over empathy, labeling it an act of "reinscribing anti-Black state violence" despite the text's unedited basis in official documentation.^[7]^[65] Such accusations, often voiced by poets aligned with identity-focused literary critiques, extended to charges of implicit racism, portraying Goldsmith's method as oblivious to power dynamics where white artists appropriate Black narratives without accountability, a view amplified in outlets like The New Republic that framed the work as opportunistic amid trending discussions of systemic racism.^[66] This perspective overlooked conceptual poetry's core tenet of authorial effacement, instead centering the artist's demographic identity as inherently disqualifying, a recurring pattern in academia and media responses to appropriation-based art post-2014.^[67] Media coverage, including a September 2015 New Yorker profile, further spotlighted these identity-driven objections, fueling debates on whether uncreative practices could survive scrutiny in environments prioritizing trauma avoidance over formal innovation, with progressive-leaning institutions exhibiting a tendency to equate textual neutrality with cultural harm.^[5] The resulting discourse highlighted tensions between empirical textual analysis and subjective interpretations of intent, where sources in literary journals frequently deferred to experiential authority over verifiable method, reflecting broader institutional biases toward outcome-based moral evaluations in artistic evaluation.^[68]

Defenses and Conceptual Justifications

Goldsmith defended the performance as an instance of uncreative writing, a practice involving the verbatim transcription and recontextualization of found documents to defamiliarize familiar texts and provoke reevaluation of their linguistic structures.^[6] He maintained that altering the autopsy report only minimally—for poetic rhythm—and presenting it in a literary setting aimed to highlight the bureaucratic detachment in official descriptions of violence, consistent with prior works like Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), which transcribed media accounts of events including the JFK assassination and Princess Diana's death without comparable public condemnation.^[6] ^[62] Supporters of Goldsmith's approach, including analyses in literary outlets, contended that the piece interrogated the sanctity of victim narratives by subjecting them to conceptual scrutiny, thereby exposing how emotional presumptions constrain artistic engagement with real-world texts.^[69] This aligns with conceptual poetry's core tenet of prioritizing procedural constraints over personal expression or moral alignment, where the artwork's efficacy stems from its formal operations rather than the creator's demographic identity or perceived sympathies.^[5] Such justifications emphasize that conflating textual appropriation with endorsement ignores the causal separation between an artist's method and interpretive projections, allowing works to function as neutral probes into language's role in constructing reality. Comparisons to historical precedents underscore perceived inconsistencies in critical responses: Vietnam War-era poems, such as W.S. Merwin's "The Asians Dying" (1968), graphically evoked civilian deaths through stark imagery of destruction and possession without incurring widespread accusations of desecration, often receiving acclaim for anti-war witness instead.^[70] Similarly, veteran poets like W.D. Ehrhart detailed combat mutilations in collections such as Winning Hearts and Minds (1972), framing them as documentary testimony that evaded backlash by aligning with prevailing political dissent.^[70] These examples illustrate a selective enforcement of propriety, where provocations involving institutionally disfavored events provoke outrage absent in analogous treatments of aligned causes, thereby revealing how contextual taboos, rather than inherent artistic ethics, dictate reception. Proponents further argued that demands for contextual deference—prioritizing victim sanctity over formal experimentation—represent an overreach that curtails open inquiry into provocative materials, favoring instead a regime of unrestricted expression where art's truth-value emerges from unfiltered confrontation with source texts, irrespective of contemporary sensitivities.^[69] This perspective critiques reactions as emblematic of broader constraints on conceptual practices, where empirical precedents of tolerated graphic appropriations in poetry (e.g., war documentation) contrast with amplified scrutiny here, attributable to shifts in institutional norms rather than objective breaches of artistic principle.^[65]

Later Developments and Ongoing Work

Post-Controversy Activities

Following the 2015 controversy surrounding his performance of material from Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Goldsmith maintained his editorial responsibilities at UbuWeb, the avant-garde archive he founded, which continued to expand its holdings of visual, concrete, and sound poetry alongside film and sound art materials.^[71] By the late 2010s, UbuWeb encompassed over 7,500 artists and thousands of works, including streaming and downloadable avant-garde films and videos, demonstrating ongoing curation amid public backlash.^[20] Similarly, as senior editor of PennSound, the University of Pennsylvania's online poetry archive, Goldsmith oversaw the addition and organization of audio recordings of poets reading their work, sustaining the platform's role as a key resource for contemporary poetry despite institutional scrutiny.^[72] In 2016, Goldsmith published Wasting Time on the Internet, a collection of essays advocating for the artistic value of digital distraction and uncreative practices in the online era, extending his pre-controversy theories on language management into contemporary media contexts.^[10] This work argued that internet browsing could foster innovative forms of creativity by repurposing mundane data flows, a position Goldsmith framed as a response to evolving information ecosystems rather than a direct rebuttal to critics.^[10] Post-2015, Goldsmith's output shifted toward visual and conceptual works on paper, incorporating appropriated texts, images, and media fragments into hybrid forms that blurred poetry with visual art. This evolution, evident in pieces produced from 2015 onward, emphasized material constraints over performative readings, as detailed in Daniel Morris's 2019 analysis, which positions these works as a deliberate pivot sustaining Goldsmith's conceptual framework amid reduced public engagements.^[73] Such pieces, often exhibited or documented in limited editions, prioritized archival and recombinatory aesthetics, reflecting resilience through tangible, non-digital artifacts.^[74]

Recent Publications and Residencies

In 2020, Goldsmith published Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, a monograph detailing the conceptual, legal, and operational challenges of maintaining his pioneering online archive of avant-garde media.^[10] This work, issued by Columbia University Press, spans 318 pages and draws on Goldsmith's experiences as UbuWeb's founder and editor since 1996, emphasizing strategies for navigating copyright disputes and digital preservation.^[10] A French translation of the book, Patrimoine pirate: Archives, circulations et polémiques artistiques à l’âge numérique, was released in 2023 by JBE Books, extending its reach to European audiences interested in digital archiving and artistic appropriation.^[10] That same year, Goldsmith compiled and published NYC Street Poets and Visionaries, a 493-page volume documenting urban poetic expressions in New York City, highlighting grassroots and outsider voices in contemporary verse.^[10] Since 2020, Goldsmith has held an ongoing artist-in-residence position at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW), where he integrates conceptual poetics into pedagogy.^[10] In this role, he taught "Duchamp is My Lawyer" in Fall 2020, exploring intersections of law, art, and language; "Experimental Writing" in Spring 2023, focusing on innovative textual practices; and is slated to offer "AI Creative Writing" in Spring 2026, addressing machine-generated composition.^[53] These courses reflect his continued emphasis on uncreative and digital methodologies in literary instruction.^[53]

Personal Life

Family and Relationships

Goldsmith has been married to visual artist Cheryl Donegan since 1989.^[75] ^[8] The couple has two sons, Finnegan (born 1999) and Cassius (born 2005).^[10] ^[76] The family has resided in New York City, where Goldsmith has maintained a low public profile on personal matters unrelated to his professional collaborations.^[77]

Health and Residences

Goldsmith has long resided in New York City, maintaining a loft in the Chelsea neighborhood that serves as both home and creative workspace.^[5] This urban base has facilitated his curation of extensive digital archives, including UbuWeb, by providing consistent access to institutional networks and cultural resources in the city.^[78] He has also divided time between New York and Istria, a region in Croatia, supporting periodic international engagements while anchoring his primary activities in the U.S.^[78] In addition to his fixed residences, Goldsmith has undertaken temporary stays through artist residencies, such as his 2007 poet-in-residence position at Shandy Hall in Coxwold, England, which involved on-site immersion to inform conceptual projects.^[79] These European sojourns have complemented his New York-centric life without disrupting long-term productivity, as evidenced by sustained output in poetry and editing post-residency.^[53] No public records indicate significant health events or conditions that have materially impacted Goldsmith's professional output or residences.^[2] His ability to commute for teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from his New York home underscores physical stability enabling ongoing archival and pedagogical commitments.^[53]

Legacy and Influence

Impact on Contemporary Art and Poetry

Goldsmith's advocacy for uncreative writing, detailed in his 2011 book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, promoted techniques of textual appropriation and data management as core to poetry in the digital era, influencing conceptual practices by prioritizing constraint-based repurposing over invention.^[80] This methodology, exemplified in his University of Pennsylvania course where originality was penalized, has shaped experimental pedagogy, encouraging poets to transcribe, remix, and archive ambient language as artistic output.^[81] Adopters in digital art and poetry, such as those extending Flarfist collage tactics, have integrated these methods to explore saturation and algorithmic generation, with verifiable instances in post-2010 anthologies and installations that cite Goldsmith's framework for handling informational overload.^[82] UbuWeb, initiated by Goldsmith in 1996, functions as a non-commercial repository preserving over 7,500 avant-garde artists' outputs, including concrete poetry, sound works, and films from movements like Dada, Futurism, and Fluxus, thereby maintaining accessible historical lineages for contemporary creators.^[83] By digitizing marginal materials without curatorial gatekeeping, it has empirically enabled cross-pollination in experimental fields; for example, its streaming of 2,500+ avant-garde videos and MP3s has supported residencies and exhibitions where artists reference archived precedents, fostering causal continuity in practices that blend poetry with multimedia.^[25] This archival scale—expanded from an initial focus on poetry to a virtual museum—has democratized access, influencing digital artists to replicate its model of open dissemination amid institutional neglect of non-commercial works.^[84] Goldsmith's texts appear in over a dozen post-2010 academic treatments of poetics, including analyses in PMLA and Journal of American Studies that dissect his role in shifting benchmarks from expressive innovation to uncreative saturation and boredom as deliberate strategies.^[85] ^[86] These citations underscore measurable ripples in debates on citation poetics, where his transcripts of weather reports or sports scores are referenced as prototypes for erasure and informational poetry, prompting empirical scrutiny of authorship in algorithm-driven environments.^[87] Such engagements have calibrated field-wide discussions, with journals noting increased experimentation in hybrid forms traceable to his interventions.^[88]

Debates on Appropriation in the Digital Age

In the digital age, the proliferation of accessible data—estimated at 2.5 quintillion bytes generated daily as of 2018—has intensified debates over appropriation as a method for artistic and poetic production, shifting focus from scarcity-driven originality to strategies for managing informational overload. Proponents, including conceptual writers, argue that appropriation enables empirical adaptation by repurposing existing language streams, fostering scalable critiques of media saturation and algorithmic patterns without the inefficiencies of invention from scratch.^[89] This approach aligns with the realities of perfect digital replication, where infinite copies undermine traditional authorship, allowing artists to reveal causal structures in cultural data flows through reframing rather than fabrication.^[29] Such defenses position appropriation not as theft but as repurposing, essential for innovation amid data abundance.^[30] Critics, however, highlight risks of decontextualization, where sourced material loses its original intent, potentially leading to exploitative or superficial outputs that fail to generate substantive insight.^[90] In academic and media discourse, often influenced by institutional biases favoring protective norms around source identities, appropriation is faulted for flattening diverse voices into homogenized forms, exacerbating concerns over power imbalances in re-use.^[91] Yet, defenders counter that intentionality in selection and presentation transforms borrowed elements, affirming the appropriator's agency and exposing underlying realities rather than merely copying.^[92] Empirical evidence from legal fair-use precedents supports this, showing transformative appropriations as viable for commentary without inherent infringement when they alter context meaningfully.^[93] These debates challenge prevailing sanctities around source material, particularly identity-constrained prohibitions that prioritize origin over utility, which some analyses trace to ideologically driven academic frameworks rather than evidence of harm.^[94] Unrestricted re-use, by contrast, promotes causal realism in art, enabling pattern recognition across datasets to yield insights unattainable through siloed preservation—evident in how digital tools facilitate broad-spectrum textual analysis yielding novel correlations.^[95] While risks persist, the evidentiary case favors appropriation's role in navigating digital realism, provided it prioritizes verifiable transformation over rote extraction.^[96]

References

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About Kenneth Goldsmith | Academy of American Poets
Born in 1961 in Freeport, New York, Kenneth Goldsmith attended the Rhode Island School of Design for sculpture and worked as a visual artist for about ten ...
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Goldsmith is the author of eight books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol ...
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Kenneth Goldsmith - Artnet
Born in Freeport, New York, in 1961, Goldsmith studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and received his BFA in 1984.
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US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem
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Kenneth Goldsmith Says He Is an Outlaw | The Poetry Foundation
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Goldsmith, Kenneth (Paul) - Encyclopedia.com
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However, I see a very significant philosophical difference. I think it comes from Cage's influence that you just mentioned and it all centers around the word " ...Missing: childhood upbringing
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Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and is a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Seven American. Deaths and Disasters, my most recent book, is all transcriptions of old radio and TV broadcasts, as is The Weather, Sports, and Traffic. And.
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It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's Repurposing
Sep 30, 2011 · Kenneth Goldsmith describes some of the ideas and works that have shaped his conception of uncreative writing.
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Online Exhibition: Weird Authority* - School of Art
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"Uncreativity as Creative Practice" Kenneth Goldsmith
The object of the project is to be as uncreative in the process as possible. It's one of the hardest constraints an artist can muster.
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Fidget - Kenneth Goldsmith, Darren Sean Wershler-Henry
Fidget is writer Kenneth Goldsmith's transcription of every movement made by his body during 13 hours on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997.
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American Book Review on FIDGET
Teasing the reader is an activity Goldsmith explored in his 1997 book, No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96 (The Figures), a 600-page poem that organizes words and ...
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Traffic - Publishers Weekly
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Sports by Kenneth Goldsmith - Goodreads
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In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribes historic radio and television reports of national tragedies as they unfurl.
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'Seven American Deaths and Disasters' Transcribes the News
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Radio Boredcast: Playlist from March 25, 2012 - WFMU
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Printing Out The Internet | Kenneth Goldsmith - Labor
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This Artist Wants to Print Out the Internet
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[52]
'Over Ten Tons of Internet': An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, the ...
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Kenneth Goldsmith - Department of English
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Penn Student Re-Types Entire Kerouac Novel I The Philly Post
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NEA / Mid Atlantic Visual Arts Fellowship, Sculpture. 1988. Artist Grant, Artist Space, New York City. 1985. Banff Center For The Arts, Canada, Residency ...
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Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry
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Kenneth Goldsmith's “The Body of Michael Brown”: How a Poem ...
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On Hearing a White Man Co-opt the Body of Michael Brown
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Reading and Rumor: The Problem with Kenneth Goldsmith - Art News
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The Poetry of the Vietnam War
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UbuWeb
No information is available for this page. · Learn why<|separator|>
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Kenneth Goldsmith - PennSound
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Jacket 21 - Marjorie Perloff: A Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith
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Proudly Fraudulent: An Interview With MoMA's First Poet Laureate ...
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In Conversation: Yve-Alain Bois and Kenneth Goldsmith
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It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing.'
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media change for poetics. Goldsmith's project exploits the misalign- ment of and tension between information culture and literary culture, and implicit in his ...
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[PDF] Appropriation and Authorship in Contemporary Art
We will find that, contrary to what has often been thought, the work of the appropriation artists affirms and exposes, rather than undermining, the artist's ...
[93]
[PDF] Copyright, Borrowed Images, and Appropriation Art: An Economic ...
But when the borrowed image is copyrighted, ap- propriation art risks infringing the rights of the copyright owner. Artists and judges have very different views ...
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(PDF) Appropriation in Art: The Fair use doctrine and the Future of ...
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[PDF] Digital Technology and Innovative Poetry Tom Jenks
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Appropriation in Contemporary Art - Inquiries Journal
The concepts of originality and of authorship are central to the debate of appropriation in contemporary art. We shall discuss these in depth in order to ...