Duchamp Is My Lawyer - by Kenneth Goldsmith (Paperback)

About the Book

In 1996, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. It grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation.

Book Synopsis

In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard.

In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other "shadow libraries" and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb's commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today's gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.

Review Quotes

Duchamp is My Lawyer is an approachable and even-handed discussion of UbuWeb and issues regarding copyright in the digital age. It also provides an insight into the evolution of the counter culture in the internet age and the practical, legal and financial issues of producing and consuming art today. Well worth seeking out.-- "Alexander Adams Art"

Duchamp Is My Lawyer displays Goldsmith fulfilling an ethics of caring about others who care about conserving odd things. Caring is at the heart of this tender homage to eccentric collectors who have put themselves at legal risk to share their obsessions.-- "William Carlos Williams Review"

A remarkably fluid and engaging read. . . When I finished Duchamp Is My Lawyer, I had the pleasure of sitting in natural silence for a brief while, pondering how much I had learnt, how entertainingly the book had conveyed its message of openness, what a gift it is to have such a light touch.-- "PopMatters"

Named a Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020-- "PopMatters"

One of the smartest manifestos on art and internet politics that I've seen.-- "The Wire"

This book, although written in the first person singular, is an example of collective enunciation, the 'I' of Kenneth Goldsmith being a cooperative person representing all those eager to rely on the creative and communicative possibilities of the net to build a collaborative framework that does not dissolve but offers new promises to all individuals as well. In that sense, Duchamp Is My Lawyer perfectly qualifies as what Deleuze and Guattari call 'minor literature, ' . . .the noncanonical use of a 'major' system to serve the needs and expectations of those at the margins.-- "Leonardo Reviews"

This is a book for lovers of art's revolutionary import and those interested in the interface between art and the law. Recommended.-- "Choice"

UbuWeb is portrayed as a small utopia in the middle of the commercial Internet, built on the principles of freedom, equality and cultural progress, but also subversiveness . . . between the lines, [Goldsmith] persuades us to create other such utopian places online, to try to transform the Internet and reclaim its vision of the future.-- "3/4 Magazine"

Kenneth Goldsmith's Duchamp Is My Lawyer details the story of UbuWeb, a free-source library for visual, audio and written art. He cites many extraordinary items - from masterpieces to flukes, oddities and trifles - that will send us rushing to the site to see, but the discussion is equally about the weighty issues of freedom vs ownership of culture. Goldsmith takes a stand - with Duchamp grinning wryly over his shoulder - for availability, access and the accumulation of knowledge. He's holding the cultural back door open and letting in all the outcasts, misfits and oddballs that would never get past the velvet ropes up front.--Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth

Duchamp Is My Lawyer is the in-depth secret history of one of Goldsmith's most expansive and long running projects--the renegade website UbuWeb. At once manifesto, memoir, treatise, exposition, critique, and gossip column, it presents an essential history of renegade underground creative activity in the past 100 or so years. Brilliantly structured and filled with wit, wisdom, and Goldsmith's provocations, it is also an inspiring and hilarious read.--John Zorn, composer and performer

Duchamp Is My Lawyer reads like an upbeat mediactivist manifesto--providing all at once an alternative political economy of open access, a humorous introduction to legal poetics, a joyful survey of artistic resistance, and an empowering toolbox to keep the web as free as we care for it to be.--Yves Citton, author of Mediarchy

In 1996, Kenneth Goldsmith sat down at his computer and initiated a website he appropriately called UbuWeb--a site soon consisting of "thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts," and unlike any of its peers in being entirely free and open to all: no sponsors, no fees, no memberships or passwords required. Over the decades, it has become clear that UbuWeb, although an unmatchable scholarly resource, is itself the avant-garde artwork we have been waiting for--a giant collage of appropriated materials, chosen, juxtaposed, and framed so as to constitute perhaps the best single available history of its subject, and one entirely created by a single author--Goldsmith himself. The artist's lively, entertaining, and revelatory account of how this uniquely democratic site was created and maintained, how he resolved vexing copyright issues, and how UBU has helped us reconsider movements from Concrete Poetry to the feminist punk of Angry Women--is nothing short of inspiring. This should be required reading for all those who wonder whether it still possible, in 2020, to speak of the avant-garde.--Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century

UbuWeb is an anomaly of the internets. The irony is that it completely functions the way we envisioned the everything would, in the beginning of internets history. Kenneth Goldsmith kept UbuWeb true to the core values of the network: humanity, collectiveness, and borderless openness. In a world where data is synonymous with control and value is synonymous with price, UbuWeb functions as an oasis.--Peter Sunde, founder of The Pirate Bay

UbuWeb is one of the great avant-garde projects of our times. In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith takes us through the aesthetic, legal, economic, and social aspects of the whole project. Through it, we see how the avant-garde had to shift gears to move from the era of analog media to that of digital, or database media. It is an essential document on the theory and practice of experimental media art.--McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto

With an unshakable belief that art belongs more in the public sphere than behind closed walls, physical or digital, Kenneth Goldsmith originated the first open source platform for those who revere culture. This invigorating and timely book surveys why brilliant ideas, images, and sounds are important to both preserve and proliferate as freely as ever.--Naomi Beckwith, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

About the Author

Kenneth Goldsmith teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. His books include Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (Columbia, 2011); Capital: New York, Capital of the Twentieth Century (2015); and Wasting Time on the Internet (2016).