reinventing an art

Critics and New Art

Posted on by newpoplitnews

THOUGHTS ON THE 3–D SHORT STORY

impression sunrise claude monet(“Impression Sunrise” by Claude Monet.)

THE TEST of an artistic critic is how swiftly the person adapts to artistic change. The ability to embrace the NEW and not be left behind.

EXAMPLES from the past include the rise of modernist art, beginning with the 19th century Impressionists. As Robert Hughes and others noted, the inability of art critics to keep up with change became a cliche, until anything new was automatically accepted in fear of being wrong again.

jazz singer

ANOTHER example is the transition in the late 1920’s from silent cinema to sound. Or, in the 50’s and 60’s, from “silver screen” movies to Technicolor and Cinemascope, which even as astute a film critic as Pauline Kael found difficulty dealing with, so enamored was she with smaller films of the 1930’s. Kael’s antipathy to wide screen movies was such that director David Lean once exclaimed to her, “You won’t be happy with any movie I make unless it’s shot on 16 mm in black and white!”

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HOW will literary critics react to the emergence of a new style of short story? One faster, more designed, more exciting than any short story offered now? A story, moreover, which fuses literary and pop elements to create a visibly different work?

Questions, questions. . . .
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Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS

The Short Story Process

Posted on by newpoplitnews

REINVENTING AN ART?

F_Scott_Fitzgerald_1921

In 2019 we plan to change things up a bit. Our commitment to excellence and artistic change will increase. The poem and short story both have become generic. Needed are drastic new ideas to improve them. Possibly, to blow up both forms and start over.

And so, “The Process.” We’ll start with the short story. I’ll be posting at one of my personal blogs several short stories I wrote in the 1990’s. Apprentice work, but a foundation for where I plan, personally, with my writing, to go. The first of these to go up is titled “The Revolutionaries.” A story with a connection to recently-deceased George H.W. Bush, so it’s appearance will be timely.

Before this I may post one of the new stories I’m working on, tentatively named “Safe Zones.” Again: timely.

Co-editor Kathleen M. Crane is also back writing, working on a rough draft of a new story– one which will carry forward her own ideas on clarity and conciseness in the short story art.

I’ll be discussing the process more in future posts. We have an end point– through radical artistic change, badly-needed renewal of the entire literary art.

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Stay tuned.

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS