Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2024)

An impassioned cri de coeur in favour of pretension as a tool for the furtherance and nurturing of art and artistic impulses in our cynical universe. A fantastic potted history of pretense opens the essay, moving on to musings on attitudes to pretension in the arts, and its importance in lifting us from the slough of mass-market miseries (a bog in which the multitudes, for whom ‘pretentiousness’ is still a sneer-term, are languishing), and the importance of rising from one’s prejudices to embrace the outré and unusual and original. Preaching to the converted, here: however, after reading one might slip the book into an intolerant friend’s napsack and lock them in a car for several hours. That friend might emerge with a fondness for Tarkovsky’s later period and a Spotify playlist featuring Arvo Pärt and Phil Glass. Quote time: “Puncture the word ‘pretentious’ and out scuttles a bestiary of class anxieties: fears about getting above your station, and policing those suspected of trying to migrate from their social background. The word is bent to fit emotional attitudes towards economic and social inequality, and used as shorthand in arguments over authenticity, elitism and populism. In the arts, pretentiousness is the brand of witchcraft used by scheming cultural mandarins to keep the great unwashed at bay. It’s a way of saying that contemporary art is a ‘con’ and that subtitled films are ‘difficult’ — that they do not appeal to everyone and therefore must be aimed at the sorts of people who think they are better that everyone else. The sorts of people who like French or Chinese or Mexican films because they won’t stand up for their country’s alleged clear-eyed pragmatism over another’s pseudery. The intellectually insecure drop the word ‘pretentious’ to shut down a conversation they don’t understand, when simply saying ‘I don’t know’ or asking ‘Can you explain this?’ would be more gracious ways to admit to being in the dark. Cutting someone down for pretension reveals, ironically, the mark of embarrassed arrogance rather than humility. The word ‘pretentious’ is deployed as an insidious euphemism of distaste for sexual difference, a synonym for ‘effeminacy’ or ‘dandyism’. Apply it to the topics of gender, sexuality, and race, and the accusation of pretension swiftly becomes a measure of how antediluvian the accuser’s attitudes are.” (p.129-130)

pretension is about over-reaching what you're capable of, taking the risk that you might fall flat on your face. without people stretching themselves and—self-consciously or otherwise—risking failure, most of the major works of art, music, literature, cinema, dance, philosophy, science, clothing, design, architecture, engineering, horticulture, and cuisine that we cherish would simply not exist. new discoveries would not be made, or—like many great innovations—accidentally stumbled across. it is the engine oil of culture, every creative motor needs it in order to keep running and not seize up and corrode with complacency.

being pretentious is rarely harmful to anyone. accusing others of it is. you can use the word "pretentious" as a weapon with which to bludgeon other people's creative efforts, but in shutting them down the accusation will shatter in your hand and out will bleed your own insecurities, prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. and that is why pretentiousness matters. it is a false note of objective judgment and when it rings we can hear what society values in culture, hear how we perceive our individual selves. pretentiousness matters because of what it teaches us about the creative process. try it: try holding pretension up to the light. turn it and observe where the light and shade falls.

Pretentiousness is something we never seem to apply to ourselves in the present tense. You may often hear it used as an insult when aimed at someone else, and you might even be bold enough to admit to it in your younger days, but rarely will you hear a person say “I am pretentious”.

Perhaps the best way to review this book is to quote Jarvis Cocker from the back cover:

Dan Fox makes a very good case for a re-evaluation of the work “pretentious”. The desire to be more than we are shouldn’t be belittled. Meticulously researched, persuasively argued - where would be be as a culture if no-one was prepared to risk coming across as pretentious. Absolument nowhere, darling - that’s where.

And the second half of this book is interesting. I found the first half rather dragged. And I think the difference is that the author is playing on home ground in the second half as he writes about music and modern art, whereas in the first half he is very much setting the scene and it felt to me a bit like he had been told what he had wasn’t long enough so could he find a way to expand it, perhaps by adding a (long) introduction? So we get several dozen pages (the whole book is less than 160 pages) about the history of acting and pretending which sort of culminate with

Where the word ‘pretentious’ differs from ‘pretending’ is that it carries with it the sting of class betrayal…

which left this reader, at least, wondering why we had spent so long looking at pretending if it is something different from the topic of the book.

I’m being a bit facetious because there are clear links that the author makes, but I found the first few chapters a bit haphazard. However, once the subject moves over to music and modern art, Fox really hits his stride and gives us a lot of interesting thinking. I am also aware that this opinion of mine might be driven by the fact that the second half of the book has considerable overlap with my pretentious youth when I was a devotee of prog rock, which I would now admit IS rather pretentious (but I still like it!).

In essence, Fox is defending a person’s right to be pretentious:

When a furious reviewer slams a book for being pretentious, they are essentially angry because it deviates from the aesthetic standards or world view they’ve chosen to subscribe to.

and warning us to be careful when we are tempted to use the word to describe what someone else has done:

You have your established schema for what a work of art should be, and then something alien arrives and throws that schema into doubt.

or

If what’s pretentious for one person is innovative and enthralling for another, is debating pretentiousness simply just another way of talking about taste?

He is defending pretension as a means of growth:

To fear being accused of pretension is to police oneself out of curiosity about the world

The essay as a whole is a plea to disregard the baggage that the word “pretentious” carries with it and to allow people to reach beyond themselves. As Fox says as the book draw to a close (apart from a final chapter that is a sort of look back to Fox’s formative years that I didn’t quite get the reason for):

Pretension is about over-reaching what you’re capably of, taking the risk that you might fall flat on your face. Without people stretching themselves and - self-consciously or otherwise - risking failure, most of the major works of art, music, literature, cinema, dance, philosophy, science, clothing, design, architecture, engineering, horticulture and cuisine (there are lots of long lists like this in the book) that we cherish simply would not exist. New discoveries would not be made, or - like many great innovations - accidentally stumbled across. It is the engine oil of culture: every creative motor needs it in order to keep running and not seize up and corrode with complacency.

And with that, I will return to my prog rock collection.

I agree with the sentiment: calling people/their interests/art pretentious is often an accusation that betrays one’s own lack of intellectual curiosity. This essay mainly focuses on if people weren’t ‘pretentious’ then we wouldn’t have x, y, z cool things, which, sure. But I do think those are two different things. Fox’s discussion on class and elitism also felt a bit disingenuous. How a person is marginalized by society has to be taken into account in a meaningful way when it comes to understanding their interactions with culture, and how their knowledge and opinions of said culture forms.

It would be more interesting to further the conversation on anti-intellectualism, the marketplace, and how much of mass market entertainment not only appeals to the lowest common denominator, but also has dangerous implications, e.g. Marvel and their military propaganda.

I’m also thinking of this Fran Lebowitz interview where she says:

Yes, society should be fair, yes, society should give everyone a chance, it should be more equal, but it’s not true of the culture. The culture is not the society. We have way too much democracy in the culture and way too little in the society. But in order to make these judgments, you have to agree or believe that some things are better than others.

“Start with externals, and proceed to internals, and treat life as a good joke. If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dulness which we need so much would have begun. And, of course, those dozen men would be considerably braver, really, than Captain Nobile or the other arctic ventures. It is not particularly brave to do something the public wants you to do. But it takes a lot of courage to sail gaily, in brave feathers, right in the teeth of a dreary convention.”

—D. H. Lawrence, The Evening News, September, 27, 1928

(Quoted in the book)

This book is about how putting someone down for being uneducated and putting someone down for being pretentious are really two sides of the same coin. It’s also about the great romance of art, beauty, culture, and moreover color, emotion, and being too much… to transform individuals and cities, and their necessity. It’s about cities and globalism and genius permutations.

The first chapter on the history of the western conception of pretentiousness and its relation to theater was really absorbing (specifically the back and forth between method acting which came from Russia and arch, prescribed laws of acting, the clash between the restraints of neoclacissism and romanticism, and the counterattack from Mamet and Brecht against naturalism, arguing for artificiality so people invest their emotions in real social change, and interestingly the mix of both colorful expressive theater and natural emotions in Shakespeare’s plays // socially contextualized roles to looking within the individual, inner authenticity and how it’s become tied up with politics both with the left against capitalism and the right against the government and rights of the individual).

My personal favorite part was the postscript on the author’s own journey of pretension and love for culture. His own career journey from Manchester to NYC as well as the truly unconventional lives of his brothers and parents. I’d like to read more about him. I also appreciated his digressions in architecture and how it reflects culture.

There was a middle chapter that really tackled the main topic head-on which was helpful. Much of the book focuses on the implications of class in matters of pretension. I loved the musings on the intersection of the music and art world as well.

Overall, it felt disorganized and at times profound but lacking enough cohesion to drive any big points home or offer any comprehensive revelations. It asks more questions and raises more musings than providing answers which I think is a lost opportunity.

Honestly, sometimes it’s enough to even read the title of a book, all of it condensed into a line. I saw it a while back and agreed. I feel inspired and wish my life to follow the same trajectory if it’s not too late to escape the ‘small town.’

quotes:

‘I was lucky. I understood pretension as permission for the imagination.’

‘Both Mum and Dad had seen the world, they knew that out there was where you had to be, however you got there. All you first had to do was transform the familiar.
Without the possibility of transformation, Mum would never have left the farm in Wales, and Dad would still be a priest following what the church would call his "true" vocation…’

‘At Oxford, another student once put me down by saying, "It must be nice doing your hobby as a degree." The idea that fine art could be a serious course of study wound him up, presumably because he could not understand how the amore of the amateur could translate into a serious life pursuit. And yet in some sense he would prove to be right: I have no qualification for what I do. I never studied art history or journalism, and I learned to write and to edit on the job. I became a professional art critic by doing it, by feeling my way through. In that sense my career as a "professional" magazine editor and art critic has been along the same ama-teurist spectrum as any number of other pursuits I've fol-lowed, making music or art.’

‘When I eventually began listening to the Bowie records in Mark's collection, I'd hear the line "I've lived all over the world, I've left every place" and it made an intuitive kind of sense. At that time it didn't much matter that my here and now was the names of Cotswold villages, that I'd barely been an hour down the motorway to London, let alone Tokyo or Berlin. Wheatley, Staten Island, Great Milton, Massif Central, Cuddesdon, São Paolo. Those were the conditions of life under pop.’

‘If you were romantic enough and half-closed your eyes, run-down 1970s Manchester could have been 1970s Berlin-the kind of city where existential crises could be had, where daily life was experienced on a battlefield for global ideologies. Saville's appropriation of European avant-garde imagery was, in his words, about "changing the here and now instead of going somewhere else." That was something I could relate to, a way of pushing the intensely local up against something too big to grasp.’

‘Wheatley, Oxford, Lontion and an eye for detail. big in small towns, sweeping sentiment and an eye for detail, it all sounds pleasingly, simplistically, romantic. But doesn't all that daydreaming imply a snobbery of geography that equates the small town with the small mind and the big city with promises of success and creative self-realization? Even if you get down the motorway from Wheatley to London there's always that moment when you have to acknowledge that you're not somewhere even more exciting-Mexico City, say, or Los Angeles-you're stuck in a bedsit in Rotherhithe.
Unless displaced somewhere by war, money, or famine, we like to think of ourselves as having an authentic right to a place. It is other people who are "immigrants," not us, not our forebears. It's those people down the street who are gentrifying the neighborhood: we, after all, are sensitive to cultural context and would never dream of eroding what attracted us here in the first place, would we? Surely we're not pretentious gentrifiers, we just came here because we dreamt of leaving our small town for a life of the mind in the big city, right?’

‘Truth is, more often than not pretension is simply someone trying to make the world more interesting, responding to it the way they think is appropriate. It's more likely that what you think is one person's pretension is anoth ex's good faith.’

‘Pretension is about overreaching what you're capable of, taking the risk that you might fall flat on your face.
Without people stretching themselves and—self-consciously or otherwise-risking failure, most of the major works of art, music, literature, cinema, dance, philosophy, science, clothing, design, architecture, engineering, horticulture, and cuisine that we cherish would simply not exist. New discoveries would not be made, or-like many great innovations-accidentally stumbled across. It is the engine oil of culture; every creative motor needs it in order to keep running and not seize up and corrode with complacency.’

‘Circle back, for a moment, to the figures of the amateur and the professional. All but the most cynical artists are amateurs-amateurs in the original French sense of the word, a "lover of" what they do. Professional artists are those who operate inside established networks and systems geared toward supporting their work—a professional community with a shared language. The meaning of the art they make can be hard to parse, yet millions of people make things just as strange and difficult.’

‘The enduring popularity of these story archetypes says something about a collective fascination with role-playing, fears about identity, age-old debates about nature versus nurture, and the superstition that life's trials are simply the gods screwing with us. They tap into the existential suspicion that identities might be mutable— like the time-traveling, gender-swapping protagonist of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography. Dissemblance is enjoyable when it's kept safe inside the local multiplex or the pages of a novel, but once you put down the book or leave the cinema, the rule is you don't take the pretense with you.’

‘"In modern political performances," writes Richard Sennett in The Culture of the New Capitalism, "the marketing of personality further and frequently eschews a narrative of the politician's history and record in office; it's too bor-ing. He or she embodies intentions, desires, values, beliefs, tastes—an emphasis which has again the effect of divorcing power from responsibility." The consummate politician is a screen onto which are projected the nebulous desires of the electorate, media and business.’

‘A discomfort with pretense is also a discomfort with power, or with the fear that nobody is in control, only acting as if they are.’

‘After all, isn't everyone himself already? How can he help being himself? Who or what else could he be? To pursue authenticity as an ideal, as something that must be achieved, is to be self-consciously paradoxical. But those who seek authenticity insist that this paradox is built into the structure of the world they live in. This world, they say, represses, alienates, divides, denies, destroys, the self. To be oneself in a world is not a tautology but a problem.’ (Quote from Berman)

‘"Thus by a significant reversal, actors' practice was enshrined in the principles of rhetoric, which then, histori-cally, became a prescriptive set of rules for the actor."’

‘The mimesis of theater, thought Plato, could only lead to self-corruption; if you played a slave you might end up servile off-stage too. He argued that imitation was mere rheto-ric, incapable of expressing the truth like philosophy could.
Indeed, European acting history became bound up with the rules of classical rhetoric used by lawyers, theologians, and diplomats. Stage acting came straight from the legal and political toolboxes of persuasion. The history of pretense is tied up with the history of power.’

‘We tell those with unrealistic expectations to "get real," "face reality," or "wake up and smell the coffee," as if the rest of their activities were a dream.
Yet we value dreams. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," wrote Shakespeare.’

‘Play, according to psychologist D. W. Winnicott, allows children to see, risk-free, what happens when their internal world engages with the external one. Yet by the time you reach an age at which you can legally drink, vote, drive, consent to sex, or get married, it's presumed you know where to draw the line between fact and fantasy, where innocent play congeals into pretension.’

My review for the Chicago Tribune:

The first thing to say about Dan Fox's "Pretentiousness: Why It Matters" is, how pretentious to write a book-length essay about pretentiousness! The second thing to say is, after reading said book-length essay, you'll be able to understand that as a compliment.

For over the course of these concise yet wide-ranging 150 pages, Fox, co-editor of the arts and culture magazine frieze, looks at the concept of pretentiousness and seeks to re-evaluate it. He questions its use as a term of denigration and sets out to explore how pretension — that is, a willingness to "pretend" to greater conditions, to take artistic risks, to question reality and to dare to be different — is basically a necessary precondition to the creation of all culture.

He begins with the classic essay move of offering up etymology, pointing out that, "The Latin prae — 'before' — and tendere, meaning 'to stretch' or 'extend,' gives us the word 'pretentious'" before proceeding to stretch this subject in virtually every conceivable direction: from Method acting to art forgery, from British accents to California valley girl upspeak, from the fashion industry to identity theft.

As he does so, he acknowledges how against-the-grain he knows his pro-pretentiousness argument to be. "It's hard to admit to pretending because in Western society no one likes a faker," he writes. "Great store is placed on 'keeping it real.' We tell those with unrealistic expectations to 'get real,' 'face reality,' or 'wake up and smell the coffee.'" This very admission of how difficult it may be to convince some people of his argument — that dreaming, playing, aspiring, pretending are the activities that make the world a fascinating place to live — is in large part what helps to make his argument so convincing.

Of course, others have tackled this territory before, and Fox gives them their due. Early on, he cites the musician and producer Brian Eno, who famously wrote in his 1996 diary, published under the title "A Year With Swollen Appendices," that he "decided to turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment" because "pretending is the most important thing we do. It's the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise." So too does Fox offer expected and necessary nods to sociologist Erving Goffman's landmark 1959 book "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" and Susan Sontag's 1964 "Notes on Camp."

But Fox also — in the discursive, erudite manner that is the hallmark of so many delightful essays — pulls in unexpected and insightful threads from a stunning array of other scholars, artists and examples, including psychologist D.W. Winnicott, Plato, "The Last Days of Disco," Shakespeare (whose "All the world's a stage" is a potential motto to pretentious people everywhere), Barack Obama, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, Dame Edith Sitwell, Jay Z, Marina Abramovic and many more to track the development of historical and contemporary attitudes about pretentiousness and its frequently championed supposed opposite "authenticity."

Fox understands that "(w)hen authenticity is in question it generates deep anxieties." He elucidates in an intelligent and conversational style the many complex layers of aesthetic, class and social discomfort that often arise in the face of pretentiousness. But even as he does so, he suggests (after an analysis of "Paris Is Burning," the 1990 documentary about drag ball culture in which competitors are rated based on, among other things, the "realness" of their drag): "Decry pretense and you not only deny the possibility of change, you remove a tool of social critique from the hands of communities that need them."

Wisely, Fox does allow that "(i)t can never be appropriated as an entirely positive word," but, per his book's subtitle, that does not make pretentiousness matter any less.

In the end, as entertaining as some people seem to think it can be to make fun of "cultural omnivores," if they're being generous, or "hipsters," if they're being harsh, Fox's essay goes a long way toward making the compelling case that "(t)he pretensions of individuals from all walks of life — their ambition, their curiosity, their desires to make the world around them a more interesting place — is cultural literacy in action."