What does building an online archive have to do with writing poetry? For Kenneth Goldsmith it is the same thing. Goldsmith is a New York-based poet, writer, editor and founder of UbuWeb,1 an online repository of avant-garde art. His claim is that his way of writing poetry is exactly the same thing as he does when he is gathering, selecting, arranging and publishing material at the archive he has been building over the last seventeen years. Goldsmith’s artistic credo is that nothing new needs to be created: “In fact, it is the archiving and gathering and the appropriation of pre-existing materials that is the new mode of both writing and archiving.”
– Read Cornelia Sollfrank’s full text: Nothing New Needs to be Created – Kenneth Goldsmith’s Claim to Uncreativity. in: Melanie Bühler, Goethe Institut Washington (Eds.), No Internet – No Art. A Lunch Byte Anthology, Onomatopee, Eindhoven (2015), pp.40-50.