Kenneth Goldsmith

I mean, Duchamp is visionary but in a way, it is very useful; it’s a way to understand how to proceed. I think at some point, in Wittgensteinian terms, we’ll have to “drop the ladder.”

It’s amazing how adaptable we are to a brand new environment, however, we adapt to it better, I think, than we can theorize it or understand it. I just think that it’s so profoundly changing on so many levels that art remains a theoretical device for understanding some aspect of what we’re going through today.

In a way, if you have a movement or type of writing that’s predicated upon not reading you actually set up a way around the problem of primary, secondary, and tertiary languages.

So conceptual writing has actually got a huge international writership and anti-readership simply, based on the idea that nobody has to read this stuff.

I think that the thing that’s happened is a paradigm shift that’s called . . . that is the digital...We have the technology that does it so much better than what we were trying to do or actually distributes it, that which has already been written, so much of what has already been written much better than we’re able to do. Writing has to then reimagine what it can be in the digital age.

Yeah writing—the smallest morpheme (tk) of language, that’s what modernism taught us—is deeply associative,

We actually say that expression and content and meaning is all part and parcel of the information that we’re moving. It’s encoded. It’s DNA. You can’t get away with it! So why try so hard to express yourself when the content that you’re working with is full of expression anyway.

I always say, if I raised my kids the way I wrote my books I would’ve been thrown in jail a long time ago.