To be accused of pretentiousness is perhaps the ultimate insult. In an age that puts inestimable value on being yourself, doing what you love and following your dreams, the idea that one is fake or inauthentic is impossible to countenance.
Though the exact definition is slippery, Dan Fox tells us that "pretentiousness" is "always pejorative". As an art critic and editor at Frieze, one of the world's finest contemporary art magazines, Fox presumably knows a thing or two about the subject. This book-length essay attempts to define the word and what it means in practice, then sets out on a wide-ranging, ultra-referential defence of it: pretentiousness is the root of art, culture and progressive social change.
Fox’s argument is far more than a polemic about narrow-minded newspaper columnists or how the art he likes is misunderstood. Firstly, he maintains a conception of pretentiousness that is relatively abstract; it is not located in specific works of art or music or film; rather, it is an inherent part of everyday life.
Fox starts at the beginning – “presumably the least pretentious place to begin” – knowing that a dip into Latin etymology and Greek theatre within the first paragraph is likely to read as just about the most pretentious thing imaginable: the book’s structure attempts to prove its content’s point.
Let’s pretend
After taking in the classics, Oscar Wilde, the restoration of the British monarchy, Brian Eno and the foundational theories of modern stage acting, the author arrives at the claim that pretending to be something we’re not (wearing masks, forming identities) is a cornerstone of our day-to-day experience.
For Fox, pretentiousness is a falsely objective judgement that implies a concrete baseline of normality from which someone else is deviating. Pretentiousness is always somebody else's problem. It is the gap between what someone is doing and what we think they should be doing.
As a way of exposing what someone believes is normal and acceptable behaviour, it tells us more about the accuser than the accused – “we can hear what society values in culture, hear how we perceive our individual selves.” Authenticity becomes a form of authority.
The book’s central point is that this form of authority is both a product and reinforcement of class consciousness, used to keep people in their place. “To demand they be ‘authentic’ to their social circumstances is a form of social control,” Fox writes. “Decry pretence and you not only deny the possibility of change, you remove a tool of social critique from the hands of communities that need them.”
In Fox’s case, the tools of social critique often come in the form of art, music, books and films. The aura of upper-class snobbery around modern art only serves to diminish the possibility of those ideas and those means of expression falling into the hands of “normal people”. He sees this control perpetuated in the media almost every day, with critics and columnists who see it as their duty to separate and further mystify the abstract, the strange, the unnerving works of art they come across.
“In the arts, pretentiousness is the brand of witchcraft used by scheming cultural mandarins to keep the great unwashed at bay,” he writes. “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 than everyone else.”
Abstract interests
A particularly bothersome aspect of this idea – that some things “aren’t for everyone” – is the inverse assumption; that some things are for everybody. This is blatantly untrue, but it is used to justify the invasive presence of mass-market entertainment in peoples’ lives. Furthermore, it implies a static populace who have no interest in things that are a little abstract or hard to immediately understand.
Such a mindset condescendingly assumes the authority to define an acceptable aesthetic for normal people, “whoever that conveniently nebulous mass is”. Fox uses the example of Kate Bush to quash this particular myth.
The book closes with a more personal chapter, describing the author’s lower middle-class upbringing in a small town near Oxford. It’s here that the references to art and culture from around the world make personal sense, and the somewhat detached tone of the book warms up into something more immediately affecting.
In accepting the striving of artists such as Bowie and Bush to become more than they started out as – in permitting their transgressive desire to build on the histories of art – pop culture can encourage “normal people” to seek out a wider conception of life, and to change both themselves and the world around them in the process. This is the book’s hopeful message.
“All those books, films, images and sounds out there: pop told its audiences that they belonged to them too,” he writes. “Go and take them, learn from them. You do not need permission from a higher authority.” Ian Maleney is an arts journalist
