Kent asked me to post his response to someone on the Digital
Emunction blog:
"OK, Brennen, but if it isn’t, then what is it I might have “plagiarized”?
I’m not saying I haven’t, I’m just curious what you mean.
I see that you are thinking about this at your blog in terms of recent art
history and theory, quoting Danto, and I think that’s great (Kenny
should think it’s great, too, since he’s supposedly all about reflection
and discussion).
In their writings on the Duchampian readymade and its neo-avant-garde
recyclings, I find critics like Buchloh and Foster more interesting than
Danto. Though they take strong exception to Burger’s wholesale dis
missal of the neo-avant-garde, they’re also very critical of ways the
great, original readymade move has been cut and pasted ad infinitum
into the art market since, say, Nouveau realisme– recycled gestures
with this or that generic tweak or novelty, that is, emptied of any radi
cal, anti-​institutional charge– ready-​made, as it were, for rapid capture
and incorporation by the networks of “Museum Culture.”
This recycling, I’d say, is transparently the case with the work of Kenny
Goldsmith (Goldsmith and Bok, to be sure, who despite their polemics
for the benefits of ego-​less “uncreativity” seem to have been drunk for
the past few years on some kind of secret Author Function Ego Juice,
are quite exuberantly open about their desire for the Museum). KG’s
work is “uncreative” and “boring” not just as affective extension of its
proclaimed poetic and “ontological” premises; it’s uncreative and boring
because it’s so damn old hat: an attempted importation of decades-​old
gestures into a Po-​Biz scene that, as Goldsmith himself puts it, “is forty
years behind art,” and thus likely (at least part of its crowd) to take
his “conceptual” banalities as exciting and new. In some circles, they
call it snake oil.
But it’s MY Day, Brennen, that is truly new, you see. The Authentic
Item. Because no one has ever done it quite like this before. I’ve taken
his whole bookum and made it mine, in single decisive act. And doing
so, I’ve put his plagiarized bookum into the dustbin of sub-​poetic sub-​
history. I am being both funny and serious, in saying that. Doubled in
my intent, so to speak, like the red-​hot “Doubled K” poker that K.
dreamily mentions in his blurb to my Day, where he acknowledges me,
his mirrored K, as his master. And it’s why he’s going to put my book up
on UbuWeb.
And one more thing, though here I’m not kidding around: What they
call “Conceptual poetry”? It’s forty years behind Broodthaers and Institu
tional Critique.
Kent"
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