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.

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Product Description: Book by Kostelanetz, Richard

Discusses Glenn Gould, Charles Ives, John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Philip Glass, and contemporary music

Product Description: Constructivist Fiction. Concrete Fiction. MARCH can only speak for itself. As for constructivist fiction, Richard Kostelanetz explains a bit in an appended essay: Constructivist fictions are built, rather than expressed; they originate to a greater degree than other art, in those parts of the writer's mind that are, in Mondrian's phrase, 'unconditioned by subjective feeling and conception...read more

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Product Description: This collection of twenty-nine essays represents a summation of Kostelanetz’s thoughts on poetry since the publication of his earlier work The Old Poetries and the New. In sections on “The New Poetries,” “Some Old,” and “Autobiographical Addenda,” the essays range from sketches of Kenneth Burke, John Berryman, and Northrop Frye through considerations of the latest sound-text poetry to Kostelanetz’s justification of his own work...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For years he was dismissed as an eccentric exponent of arbitrary noise punctuated by silence. Now, however, John Cage is universally acknowledged as the most influential composer of his generation. Cage's activities as composer, graphic artist, poet, teacher, critic and—not least—writer are explored in this collection of readings by and about this avant-garde pioneer, covering his most innovative period, 1933–1970...read more

Product Description: One of America's most distinguished independent artists/intellectuals, Richard Kostelanetz, has written a prescient volume that uses, as a starting point, the philosopher Robin Collingwood's notion that the historian and the novelist have much in common, for both attempt to define the largest lines of historical development...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)