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Pretentiousness and failure

20 Oct 21 | Re: What it means to be pretentious | Link-U-Post

Like a Borgesian hero transfixed by the zahir, I've always been intrigued by the topic of pretentiousness in art. I think I know pretentiousness when I see it and I know I don't like it, but I have trouble defining what it is and why it's even bad. I needed someone to explain it to me, so I had high hopes of the book Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox.

Unfortunately the book isn't 100% what I was hoping for. There's a lot in there that is extraneous to the points I'm interested in. Mainly this is two things. First, talking about pretentious people rather than pretentious art. That is on topic but it's not something I'm interested in - as far as I'm concerned people can be as pretentious as they like in their personal lives. Second is a frequent confusion or muddying of actual pretentiousness and mere pretending. I don't think those are the same thing at all, so much so that Dan Fox talking about pretending is irrelevant and tends to get in the way. What I really wanted was a list of examples of art that might be considered pretentious, with discussions of why and whether the criticism was valid or not. There isn't a lot of that.

However Dan Fox does eventually get to the point that interests me, at the end of chapter 7. His key finding after 121 pages is that: "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... would simply not exist... It is the engine oil of culture."

That crystalises a point that I had been trying to reach for some time, which is: pretentiousness implies failure. If I say Borges is pretentious, I'm saying that he has tried to use the short story as a vehicle to make super duper jaw dropping philosophical points and has not succeeded in doing so. On the other hand I'm never going to describe Dante as pretentious, even though he tried to explain an entire moral and philosophical system and pass judgement on his whole political world in a newly invented type of long-form poem with himself as its main character, because in my assessment, he pulled it off.

Therefore I think there is a case to be made for retiring "pretentious" as a criticism. If the only difference between a pretentious work and an unpretentious one is that the unpretentious one is, like, good, then why not focus the criticism on what stops the pretentious one from being good? We're saying that pretentious means "ambitious and bad". But it's not bad to be ambitious, so criticism should attend to the other aspects. For Borges, we might complain that he has few compelling characters and little plot, and often seems to misunderstand the fundamentals of the big concepts that he addresses, for example with respect to the nature of infinity. That way we're on much firmer ground: we can monster him as much as we like without offending Dan Fox at all.

However I do think there might still be a place for complaining about pretentiousness in certain circumstances. As Dan Fox has it, there's no shame in sometimes failing. Arguably if you never fail, it means you aren't taking enough risks. I accept that. But. Let's say a writer or musician has been active for several decades and produced nothing but intellectually ambitious, artistically unsuccessful tosh. Let's also say that this writer or musician is widely and mistakenly lauded by others. It's conceivable that aspects of this situation could be somewhat annoying, and that as a result one might want to disparage the writer or musician in question. In such a situation it might be handy to have recourse to a word that means "ambitious and bad". So, in these circumstances only, and with the utmost in care, judgement and tact, it might not be de trop to pull "pretentious" out of one's arsenal.

Finally I do just want to talk about the postscript to Dan Fox's book. I happened to read it very close to the 30th anniversary of the album Foxbase Alpha by my favourite band Saint Etienne. Imagine my surprise on finding that they're also Dan Fox's favourite band and that he's written an entire postscript based around a track from that very album. Good on him for that and I very much enjoyed reading it. However I don't quite get the relevance because Foxbase Alpha is of course an unqualified artistic success and thus wholly unpretentious.

Posted by HORACIO OLIVEIRA at 20:49

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