Without ‘pretentiousness’, we wouldn’t have Bowie or the Beatles
Ten years ago I wrote a book called Pretentiousness: Why It Matters. I was an editor at a contemporary art magazine at the time. (You’re thinking, of course he’d write a book about pretension.) I had seen the word ‘pretentious’ lobbed at the art world so many times that I became curious about its usage and the fits of apoplexy it accompanied. Usually the accusation came from university-educated journalists who invariably paired the word ‘pretentious’ with that exhausted old faithful, “Emperor’s New Clothes.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines pretension as “a claim or aspiration to something” and “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed.” To some degree I could understand why the art world was accused of it: the jargon-puffed language, austere architecture, the opaque seriousness of it all, had inflationary effects on art that could irritate even professionals such as me. But I suspected that the word “pretentious” was doing more than the dictionary suggested. I wanted to know what.
I observed a disconnect between the accusers of pretension and the accused. My working life was spent around creative people who believed sincerely in what they were doing. A few were insufferably self-important – maybe I was too, occasionally – but the majority of people I knew in the arts were trying to be true to their interests and talents. People were ambitious but nobody cared about “affecting greater importance” than they possessed. Our conversations were earnest. Admittedly they could lean esoteric, impassioned in that somewhat blinkered way that debates in specialist worlds can be, but there was a great deal of self-deprecating laughter too. Nobody schemed behind closed doors about hoodwinking the rubes with conceptual art and experimental literature.
But surely, some things are undeniably pretentious? As I wrote, friends offered examples for debate. “Is David Bowie pretentious?” Of course, that’s what I love about him. The shape-shifting personae, his celebration of non-conformity, the way he wove allusions to high art into wildly popular songs. “Is wine pretentious?” Viticulture is 7,000 years old. What drink is wine aspiring to be? Modern art and fashion came up with predictable frequency. Anything smelling of art’s shady cousin, the “arty.” But the more I researched usages of the word, the more I found that the line beyond which a thing became pretentious seemed wildly calibrated.
I discovered that smart watches were pretentious. Atheism was pretentious. So were meditation, Toyota Prius cars and spiral staircases. According to FourSquare, Washington DC had at least 15 pretentious restaurants. Italian politician Maurizio Gasparri described the 2014 England World Cup squad as “pretentious pricks” when Italy beat England in 2014. The French – all of them – were routinely branded pretentious in British newspapers, a line they’ve flogged since 1066.
Pretension, it seems, is partly a case of taste, and partly morality. In his 1996 diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices, musician Brian Eno reclaimed pretension as a compliment. He questioned the division of the world into “real” people and fakers, and the assumption that pretending was morally wrong. For artists, “pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments.”
The word “pretending” shares its root with “pretension”, both deriving from the Latin prae – meaning ‘before’ – and tendere, to stretch or extend. Think of something held in front of you, like a mask or a shield, a representation. Much in life involves pretending, whether we acknowledge it or not. Pretending to be enthusiastic at a job you loathe. Pretending to be confident when inside you’re anxious. Using clothes and language to project authority or desirability. But that’s held in tension with important qualities of honesty and integrity. We’re asked to “act the part,” assessed on workplace “performance,” yet at the same time told to “keep it real” and “be true to yourself.”
I find something puritanical in the accusation of pretension. It’s a sneer at sophistication and “trying too hard.” The word has pernicious uses. I’ve seen it deployed as a sly euphemism for sexual difference, and observed movie critics tie it to the word “foreign.” In the class-neurotic UK, the pretension charge is a way of telling people to know their place. It might seem fair to poke fun at the airs and graces people put on – we all enjoy seeing pomposity mocked – but calling someone pretentious is also a way of indicating that a person is behaving in ways they’re unqualified for because of their social or economic status. Pretension as a put-down is a cudgel of conformity, a way to police people out of curiosity about the world. It reaffirms class prejudice about what “ordinary” people might be interested in, as if ordinary people are incapable of liking, say, subtitled films or classical music.
In art, as in life, many things are hard to fathom, their meaning opaque or irrelevant to us. There is something childlike in the expectation that we must understand everything we encounter, that all art must be relatable to all people. But in an age that rewards emphatic opinion and instant expertise, people are afraid of saying publicly “I don’t understand” or “I don’t know.” What’s regarded as pretentious is usually what’s new. Then time makes the alien become familiar. Decades after they are made, once-vilified paintings are found on souvenir tea-towels and posters in dental surgeries. But artists must try things out, court failure and risk being misunderstood, otherwise culture stagnates.
After my book came out, I was contacted by a man who worked as an electrician. He explained to me that he wrote poetry but felt that he had to keep it quiet. If pretension is a question of optics – acting in bad faith for the sceptic, innocent effort for the optimist – then all our beloved pasttimes are, potentially, pretentious sins. Imagine having a passion for dancing or learning new languages and being told, you’re not trained in choreography, you’re not well-travelled enough, who do you think you are?
It doesn’t hurt to encourage people’s creative interests, but it’s damaging to shut them down. If artists stayed in their given lane, there would be no Beatles, no Dolly Parton or Beyoncé. Working class writers from Barry Hines and Shelagh Delaney to Kit de Waal and Douglas Stuart would never have written a word. David Hockney would’ve been discouraged from art college. Michael Caine, Julie Walters, Maxine Peake and John Boyega would all be unknowns and Succession star Brian Cox would still be in Dundee, perhaps running a shop like his father did.
I recently sat with my 80-something mum and enjoyed an old Harold Pinter play on the radio, The Dumb Waiter, starring Bob Hoskins and Roy Kinnear. My mum has always loved the arts and is open-minded about anything new. Like Pinter and Hoskins, she comes from a working-class family. My grandfather was a shepherd and she grew up in a remote farmhouse in North Wales with no electricity. The family was Welsh-speaking. My mum didn’t learn English until she was 10.
Education was prized by the family but my mum had to leave school at 16 and never had the opportunity to go onto university. She encouraged my artistic interests tirelessly, taking me to museums and the theatre, buying me art supplies, indulging my pop music obsessions. Modest to a fault, she would never, as the OED has it, consider that listening to a Pinter play was an attempt to impress anyone. The arts have simply enriched her life and mine.
Next time you level the accusation of pretension, consider what might be lost if the world fell into line with your tastes. If a thriving culture – one in which people from all backgrounds have the opportunities to develop their talents – is a pretentious one, then I’m all for it.
Pretentiousness: Why It Matters is republished by Fitzcarraldo on April 17
