Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it?
Kenneth Goldsmith has long been a figure of tension in the literary community: at once a savior for the conceptual intellectualists and avant-garde, and a malicious clown bent on provocation and appropriation. In a profile for the New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson dives into Goldsmith’s humble beginnings as a text-based artist and traces the line from there to the infamous Michael Brown reading, offering context to both sides of the controversy surrounding Goldsmith’s career in a surprisingly and refreshingly even-handed way.
