Richard Cory Kostelanetz (born May 14, 1940) is an American artist, author, and critic.

Birth and Education

Kostelanetz was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the conductor Andre Kostelanetz. He has a B.A. (1962) from Brown University and an M.A. (1966) in American History from Columbia University under Woodrow Wilson, NYS Regents, and International Fellowships; he also studied at King's College London as a Fulbright Scholar during 1964-1965.^[1]

He is the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967), Pulitzer Foundation (1965), the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (1981–1983), Vogelstein Foundation (1980), Fund for Investigative Journalism (1981), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001), CCLM (1981), ASCAP (1983 annually to the present), American Public Radio Program Fund (1984), and the National Endowment for the Arts with ten individual awards (1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991). He also assumed production residencies at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm, Experimental TV Center (Owego, NY), Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Jerusalem), and the MIT Media Lab.

Works

Kostelanetz came onto the literary scene with essays in quarterlies such as Partisan Review and The Hudson Review, then profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times Magazine; these profiles were collected in Master Minds (1969).

His book The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (1974) caused considerable controversy. SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony (2003) chronicles cultural life in New York City in the late 20th century. In 1967, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest," vowing to refuse to pay taxes raised to fund the Vietnam War.^[2]

Books of his radically alternative fiction include In the Beginning (1971) (the alphabet arranged in single and double letter combinations), Short Fictions (1974), More Short Fictions (1980, and Furtherest Fictions (2007)); of his mostly visual poetry, Visual Language (1970), I Articulations (1974), Wordworks (1993), and More Wordworks (2006).

Among the anthologies he has edited are On Contemporary Literature (1964, 1969), Beyond Left & Right (1968), John Cage (1970, 1991), Moholy-Nagy (1970), Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), Scenarios (1980), and The Literature of SoHo (1981).

A political anarchist-libertarian, he authored Political Essays (1999) and Toward Secession: More Political Essays (2008) and has since 1987 been a contributing editor for Liberty.^[3] In 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.^[4]

Media

Among his literary contemporaries, Richard Kostelanetz has also produced literature in audio, video, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. Though he coined the term "polyartist" to characterize people who excel at two or more nonadjacent arts, he considers that, since nearly all his creative work incorporates language or literary forms, it represents Writing reflecting polyartistry. "Wordsand" (1978–81) was a traveling early retrospective of his work in several media.