Kenneth Goldsmith - Whitney Ratliff

"Poetry, today, occupies the position that conceptual art once held in the art world. Conceptual art was in its inception an act of resistance, one through the dematarialization called into question the status of the unique art object and the sole privilege of the author propose that art can be made by anyone regardless of their skill set. And it also claimed that art could have democratic distributions able to be experienced by all. Of course we know today that conceptual art has been thoroughly degraded into the canon of art history and has acquired great value. And yet its original utopian ethos lives on continually providing much needed framework, strategies of resistance, and roadmaps of art dematerialized, and radical democratic, digital world." - Kenneth Goldsmith (At 20 minutes)

Goldsmith talks about using the back door as the front door and how poetry is important and how using the back door is, for most of the time, the better way to into the art world. He explains in further detail poetry in relationship of conceptual work and continued by individually looking at artworks and explaining their construction and meaning about the piece and its relationship with the much wider world during a certain timeframe in history.

He later lists off everything society is doing such as tweeting, talking, facebooking etc except for paying attention to the art on the wall, that the art on the wall has become secondary to everything else in the world. No one is stopping to smell the roses. Everyone is in a rush, constantly wanting an instantaneous relationship with others and not understanding the meaning behind the art on the wall and stopping to enjoy the moment or to go and see a person in person rather than creating this distance between others and holding that relationship as more important than actually facing the person physically.