Richard Kostelanetz

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Richard Cory Kostelanetz (14 May 1940, New York City) is a prolific American artist, author and critic. He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the composer Andre Kostelanetz. He has a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. from Columbia University; he studied as well at King's College, London. He is a passionate defender of the avant-garde. At one point, most famously, he sued the New York State Council on the Arts. Like a number of small press authors, Kostelanetz may have published too much. But wit and intelligence and good humor shine though a sometimes turbid sky. Too cranky to be beloved or even, sometimes, believed, he is nonetheless universally respected. He first sidled onto the literary scene with learned essays in quarterlies like The Hudson Review, then burst forth with glamorous profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times; these profiles were collected in Master Minds. As he got older he got quirkier. He turned on his literary elders with The End of Intelligent Writing. Among the anthologies of younger writers he has edited: Scenarios(1980) and The Literature of SoHo (1981). SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony (2003) evinces not the Latest but the Last.He has also produced Literature in audio, video, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. Indeed, no other American writer has worked as long or as variously with these media. Kostelantez recently looked in the mirror and catalogued who he saw:

Essays

Alternative Exposition

Book Autobiography

Memoir

Political Criticism

Profiles of Major Artists & Intellectuals

Arts History

Social History

Cultural History

Literary History

Book Reviewing

Music Criticism

Literary Criticism

Music Journalism

Extended interviews

Film & Video Criticism

Book Art

Iris prints

Radio Plays

Radio features

Silkscreen prints

Audio Documentary

Drawings with lines & numbers

Hörspiel (German ear plays)

Electro-Acoustic Musical Composition

Texts for Composers

Video narration

Multiplex Holography

Transmission Holography

Documentary Photography

Creative Photography

Performance Texts

Verbal Poetry

Satire

Visual Poetry

Verbal Fiction

Visual Fiction

Acoustic Fiction

Travel Writing

“Creative Non-Fiction”

Editing of Taste-Making Anthologies

Literary Journal Editing

Autobiographical video

Organizing Assemblings

Cameraless video

Audiovideotapes

Public art proposals

Documentary film

Narrative film

Abstract film

Experimental Prose

Text objects

Kinetic installations

Live media presentations

Thematic collecting of certain books, verbal art, and Rockaway postcards

Overseeing seminars in experimental writing

[edit] Selected bibliography

Master Minds (1970)
In the Beginning (1971, novel)
The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (1974, criticism)
Recyclings: A Literary Autobiography (1974)
Unfinished Business: An Intellectual Nonhistory, 1963-89 (1990)
Politics in the African-American Novel (1991, criticism)
Published Ecomia 1967-91 (1991)
On Innovative Art(ist)s (1992)
Woodworks (1993)
Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993)
Minimal Fictions (1994)
Crimes of Culture (1995)
Ecco Kosti (1996)
Opening (1996)
Conversing with Cage (second ed., 2003), a collage of interviews with John Cage. Kostelantz on Cage is Kostelanetz at his best.