Richard Kostelanetz

An Anthology (Da Capo Paperback)

John Cage

How are we to understand, define, and critically evaluate the function, origin, and types of art and establish criteria for describing a work as "superior?" While such esthetic questions are unchanging, the answers vary markedly from decade to decade and even year to year, depending upon the prevailing opinion of critics, artists, and the public. Esthetics Contemporary has been revised and updated to include fourteen new selections from many of the most respected authorities on literature, dance, the visual arts, theatre, music, cinema, and architecture. Kostelanetz captures the rich diversity of our changing views of art while at the same time discloses its variegated influence on the contemporary art scene. Esthetics withers if compelled to remain within the stultifying confines of rigid theories. The experiential dimension of esthetic requires that it change if trends and breakthroughs in the arts are to be appreciated fully. Esthetics can ill afford to ignore the fluid reality of creative forces - that intimate and interpenetrating relationship between the esthetic theory of a particular period and the arts that dominate. Featured in this volume are discussions of the future of music, minimalist tendencies in dance, conceptual art, theatre esthetics, de-architecturalization, art as internal technology, the esthetics of the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, photography and esthetics, video art, radio drama, affirmation of space-time forces, criticism of imaginative writing, a structural-informational approach to cinema, phenomenal art, and much more. The first edition of Esthetics Contemporary distinguished itself as a pioneering volume that gave new meaning and clearer understanding to the often misunderstood world of contemporary art. This revised edition with its many new selections will continue that fine tradition into the next decade and beyond.

Esthetics Contemporary

Beyond Left and Right

E. E. Cummings

John M. Rocco

Collects the poet's most avant-garde poetry and prose, including deviant traditional verse, erotic poetry, visual poetry, texts set to music, condensed prose, and elliptical narratives

AnOther E.E. Cummings

An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-means Performances

The Theatre of Mixed Means

Scripts to Perform

Scenarios

"Kostelanetz excels, for instance, at astutely cynical debunkings of many of the 'radical chic' culture heroes of the 60s. . . . He can be scathingly funny as well deflating both the over-rated trendy avant-gardists and the 'New York Intellectual' elders who tyrannized the time. . . . As a meticulously reconstructed record of literary coming of age in a particularly propitious cultural moment, 'One Million Words' has carved out a unique place in the annals of literary autobiography."Library

One Million Words of Book Notes, 1958-1993

Literary Politics in America

The End of Intelligent Writing

The Old Poetries and the New

Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Criticism

The Young American Writers

Kensington Arts Association

Beth Learn

Angelo Sgabellone

The First Large Definitive Survey of North American Language Art, November 4-30, 1975

Language & Structure in North America

An Anthology (A Da Capo paperback)

Moholy-Nagy

An Anthology of American Contemporaries

Possibilities of Poetry

Distinguished composers, performers, and critics offer views of one of the most important figures in twentieth-century music

Writings about John Cage

Charles Ives, Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Wilson

American imaginations

"Having already published collections of critical essays on fiction, poetry, performance, politics and visual art, Richard Kostelanetz for the first time selects here from his writings on film and video. As in earlier volumes, these essays emphasize the primacy of possibilities intrinsic in each medium. Always representing radical alternatives, he writes with uncommon perception not only about familiar issues but about films customarily forgotten, and always with his customary clarity. Also included are prefaces and transcripts from his own films and videos. He writes: "Another implicit assumption behind my activity is acknowledging the importance of books in collecting together initially scattered opinions, for I have long contended that the critic who fails to risk publishing books is just a reviewing journalist, or, worse, an opportunist." Celebrating four decades of book-publishing, he remains a prolific force and a unique independent voice. Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, A Reader's Digest to Twentieth-Century Writers, The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster's Dictionary of American Authors, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories. Living in New York City, where he was born, he still needs two bucks to take a subway."--Publisher's website.

Alternative Views

Film and Video

"Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz's work in several fields appear in various editions of A Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers (ed. Peter Parker, Oxford), The Chronology of American Literature (Houghton Mifflin), The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, The Facts on File Companion to 20th Century Poetry, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in U.S. Writers, Editors, and Poets, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in theWorld, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories. When the publishers listed in the annual Directory of American Poetry Publishers (Dustbooks) have been asked to name five poets they printed recently, he generally ranks between numbers three and six, with twenty votes."--Publisher's website.

More Wordworks

Jesse Reiswig

B.B. King is a national treasure. For more than five decades, he has been the consummate blues performer. His unique guitar playing, powerful vocals, and repertoire of songs have taken him from tiny Itta Bena, Mississippi, to worldwide renown. In this comprehensive volume, the best articles, interviews and reviews about B.B. King's life and career have been gathered. Learn how he first made his mark as a disc jockey in Memphis hawking "Pepticon" elixir and taking the moniker of the "Beale Street Blues Boy"; trace his early tours and recordings; see him be swept up in the blues revival; and finally, enjoy his fame as the greatest living exponent of the blues style.

6 Decades of Commentary

The B.B. King Reader

Robert Smithson, Gertrude Stein, Claes Oldenburg, El Lissitsky, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Serra, Timothy Leary, Ad Reinhardt, Adrian Piper, R. Buckminster Fuller, Vito Acconci, Wynham Lewis, F. T. Marinetti, Lucy R. Lippard, John Baldessari, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Sol Lewitt, and a variety of other poets, painters, sculptors, composers, physicists, anthropologists, and philosophers all cooperate here to construct a mode of communication which is no longer bound to specific categories of referentiality nor, consequently, to manipulated divisions of aesthetic labor.

Alternative Forms of Exposition

Essaying Essays

This essential reader includes Thomson's essays on making a living as a musician; his articles on classic composers; his relation to his contemporaries; his articles on newcomers in the music world, including John Cage and Pierre Boulez; his autobiographical writings and commentary on his own works.

A Reader: Selected Writings, 1924-1984

Virgil Thomson

Richard Kostelanetz

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