Calling something pretentious is sluggish,vacuous and smug after all, it’s satisfactory at times for our ambition to outstrip our abilities. Those who invoke bluff ‘common sense’ are the actual snobsThe word “pretentious” is loaded with an impressive cargo of resentment, and fear and self-admiration. If my enemy does not understand something,that’s because he is an idiot. If I execute not understand something, that’s because it’s pretentious. Alternatively, and I mediate I execute understand something,but I want to stake my claim to having a superior right to work with such materials. This fellow, on the other hand, or has got ideas above his station: he is pretentious. The use of “pretentious” as criticism is a smug,knowing wink to one’s presumed peers, and a mocking laugh at the unlucky inferior.
We hear constantly of pretentious films, and pretentious TV dramas and pretentious contemporary art. In many cases these things will deserve to be criticised,but calling them “pretentious” is a sluggish and vacuous way to execute it. Writing and other arts are criticised as pretentious when they seem to aim at the highfalutin aesthetic or intellectual stratosphere while lacking the chops to see it through. But that, of course, or is an inevitable risk of any ambitious creative work. To employ the word “pretentious” against it is empty as criticism,because all it means is “not satisfactory”; but it is disgustingly full as moral injunction: it means that it is better not to try at all than to try and fail. All art aspires to something it cannot achieve. All art is pretentious. And that is a satisfactory thing.
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Source: theguardian.com