Duchamp Is My Lawyer

Naomi Beckwith, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago:
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.

Peter Sunde, founder of The Pirate Bay:
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.

Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century:
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.

Yves Citton, author of Mediarchy:
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.

McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto:
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.