Letter to Bettina Funcke

<p>Saturday, November 6, 2010<br /> New York City</p> <p>Dear Bettina,</p> <p>It’s been more than a month since we had coffee and the whole time, I’ve been thinking about how to best enact your suggestion: claiming UbuWeb as an artwork, perhaps the most significant artwork I will ever make. Or else to try to weave the various strands into my practice as a Gesamtkunstwerk. For the past fifteen years, I’ve been working daily on UbuWeb, a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. And although the site gives the smokescreen of being a large organization, the truth is that it’s pretty much me doing everything: from design to curating to coding, it’s a one-man operation. Most of my work is secretarial, fending off lawsuits and placating angry copyright holders, answering endless submissions, fielding queries from curious reporters, dealing with server crashes and denial-service hacks, and keeping the machines running. The procuring of content and the hand-coding of HTML are actually the most relaxing parts of what I do, often times late at night, after the kids have gone to bed, with a big glass of Jack Daniels by my side.</p> <p>Wait. I’ve just admitted something that I’ve never stated publicly. UbuWeb is entirely me. I’ve always wanted to remain faceless, letting the site speak for itself. There’s nothing worse than a vanity site, the kind of place where some overriding ego, name, and agenda speaks louder than the work that’s presented. So instead of this being “Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb,” I’ve put forth the notion of a faceless institution. From the austere way the site is designed, to the fact that I always speak about it in the first-person plural as “we,” to the massive amount of content that “we” host, I’ve always tried to throw the focus away from me. But in truth, with the exception of the occasional student or intern, it’s all me…</p>