Brian Droitcour Introduces Art in America Review of UbuWeb Memoir

Art in America editor Brian Droitcour introduces a review by Raphael Rubenstein on Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (Columbia University Press, 2020), a "manifesto-like memoir" by Kenneth Goldsmith. From the editor's letter:

Goldsmith’s reputation hasn’t fully recovered from his ill-conceived reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report at a Brown University poetry conference in 2015 (which I wrote about at the time), and his unapologetic insistence on never asking permission feels a little anachronistic today, amid movements to ensure that artists are paid for their work. “One can’t help wondering what the members of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), with their campaign for ‘fair remuneration’ in the nonprofit world, make of Ubu’s stance of not paying, nor even seeking permission from its contributors,” writes Rubinstein. But Goldsmith and Rubinstein alike offer compelling arguments for the redemption of piracy, highlighting the importance of access to old works that would otherwise vanish into obscurity.

The review focuses mostly on the archive:

…Faced with the labyrinthine riches of Goldsmith’s archive, in which there is always one more fascinating item to click on, one more gap in your art-knowledge to fill, one more wormhole to lose yourself in, it might be a good idea to remember Borges’s parables about the dangers of limitless memory and archives without end. (In case you wondered, UbuWeb includes two-plus hours of documentary film about Borges.) No one wants to return to a world where you had to spend fifteen years hunting down a krautrock rarity or wait passively for Anthology Film Archives to screen some vintage Rudy Burckhardt films (UbuWeb currently hosts twenty-three of them, a boon to Burckhardt fans even without the sharpness of movie-theater projection), yet the cumulative effect of that “sheer mass of past” on UbuWeb or any of its online brethren can be a kind of mental and creative exhaustion.…

Check out the full review at Art in America.