[MD] Quality: It's Image in the Arts

[Arlo Bensinger]

All,

David Granger recently suggested a book called "<>", edited by Louis 
Kronenberger. He wrote to me "The front flap reads, "Can it 
reasonably be maintained that one work of art has quality and another 
has not? Or that one is better than another? Is value in art entirely 
subjective or are there real, identifiable values? These are the 
questions examined by the distinguished authors of <>..."" (this book 
was published in 1969 by Atheneum).

I found instead a 1969 Atheneum book edited by Kronenberger titled 
"Quality: It's Image in the Arts". I checked this out from our 
library this afternoon, and thought I'd pass on the recommendation. 
The book has no ISBN, instead is printed with a Library of Congress 
Catalog Number of 70-86179. It is a collection of essays, each 
spotlighting a different "Art" (Music, Theatre, Sculpture, Painting, 
Opera, Graphics, Fiction, Wit and Humor, etc.), each by different 
contributing authors. This may be the same book, as it'd be unusual 
for two similar themed books, same editor, same publisher and same 
year, to be printed, but not impossible.

The Music essay was written by Virgil Thompson and I believe appeared 
in part as an essay in the New York Time Review of Books called "What 
is Quality in Music?".

 From the Preface.

"Quality, or whatever our term for what is good and valuable of its 
kind, is the chief element in almost all aesthetic appraisal; if not 
the whole, then certainly the heart, of criticism. What is good and 
valuable will seldom, of course, be flawless; but what it lacks, or 
in what way it is limited, will neither disfigure nor discredit it, 
and in every age we feel the need to search it out. If today, in a 
forever changing age with "revolutionizing" fads and sometimes 
totally inverted values, there is reason to reaffirm the need for 
quality, there is equal reason to reinvestigate the nature of it- to 
prod and poke at all the traditional sturdy truths, and not entirely 
scorn the spindly or rusty hypotheses, and allow for disagreement 
about everything involved, except that quality does exist and endure, 
and that there are ways of identifying it. On this single postulate, 
indeed, this book was conceived, and its contributors were invited to 
proceed thereafter as they saw fit." [Sounds like ZMM, doesn't it? -Arlo]

... "Quality has not been used  as an empedestaled abstract noun or a 
venerated caryatid of the good and beautiful; the contributors have 
often looked at it as something with an unfamiliar or half-veiled 
face, with an unsuspected or ambiguous form." [Dynamic Quality? -Arlo]

This book is OOP, but here are four copies available via Amazon's 
Used Book area.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000HS559Q/ref=dp_olp_2/002-5654576-3428866?ie=UTF8&qid=1173811705&sr=8-1

You can also likely get a copy through your local library.