What Could the Net Neutrality Repeal Mean for the Art World?
Kenneth Goldsmith
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Recognized in 2013 as MoMA's first-ever poet laureate, Kenneth Goldsmith has been a groundbreaking force in cultural academia and contemporary poetry. A founding editor of the indespensible online archive Ubuweb,—a noncommercial resource of avant-garde recorded material, ranging from visual, concrete, and sound poetry, as well as film, video, and sound art—Goldsmith's career as poet, artist, and critic has been instrumental in using the internet as a way to liberate information and access. From 26 July to 31 August 2013, Goldsmith curated a conceptual art project called Printing Out the Internet in collaboration with LABOR and UbuWeb, that invited the public to print and send pages from the Internet to an art gallery in Mexico City, with the intention to literally print out the entire Internet. The exhibition was dedicated to the internet activist Aaron Swartz who committed suicide while facing charges for the illegal downloading and dissemination files from the digital library JSTOR earlier that year. Known for his conceptual practices of "uncreative writing," Goldsmith's work frequently involves working with preexisting texts, which he alters, remixes, and effectually appropriates and repurposes without credit to the original source. One example of this was a controversial reading of his poem, The Body of Michael …
Recognized in 2013 as MoMA's first-ever poet laureate, Kenneth Goldsmith has been a groundbreaking force in cultural academia and contemporary poetry. A founding editor of the indespensible online archive Ubuweb,—a noncommercial resource of avant-garde recorded material, ranging from visual, concrete, and sound poetry, as well as film, video, and sound art—Goldsmith's career as poet, artist, and critic has been instrumental in using the internet as a way to liberate information and access. From 26 July to 31 August 2013, Goldsmith curated a conceptual art project called Printing Out the Internet in collaboration with LABOR and UbuWeb, that invited the public to print and send pages from the Internet to an art gallery in Mexico City, with the intention to literally print out the entire Internet. The exhibition was dedicated to the internet activist Aaron Swartz who committed suicide while facing charges for the illegal downloading and dissemination files from the digital library JSTOR earlier that year. Known for his conceptual practices of "uncreative writing," Goldsmith's work frequently involves working with preexisting texts, which he alters, remixes, and effectually appropriates and repurposes without credit to the original source. One example of this was a controversial reading of his poem, The Body of Michael Brown in 2015 wherein Goldsmith read the autopsy report issued by the St. Louis County Coroner's Office on the shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, setting off nationwide protests and triggering the Black Lives Matter movement.
On May 11, 2011, Goldsmith was invited to the White House by the President and Mrs. Obama for a celebration of American poetry, alongside Billy Collins, Common, Aimee Mann, Jill Scott, and Steve Martin. He has published ten books of poetry, as well as a book of essays titled "Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age" (2011). Goldsmith was also the host of a weekly, free-form radio show on WFMU from 1995 to June 2010.
Born 1961
Hometown Freeport, NY
Lives and Works New York, NY
Education
BFA Sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, 1984
Works Available for Purchase
No works
