Pretentiousness: Why it Matters
Regular price
€18.50
What is pretentiousness? Why do we despise it? And more controversially: why is it vital to a thriving culture? In this brilliant, passionate essay, Dan Fox argues that it has always been an essential mechanism of the arts, from the most wildly successful pop music and fashion through to the most recondite avenues of literature and the visual arts. Pretentiousness: Why it Matters unpacks the uses and abuses of the term, tracing its connections to theatre, politics and class. From method acting to vogueing balls in Harlem, from Brian Eno to normcore, Fox draws on a wide range of references in advocating critical imagination and open-mindedness over knee-jerk accusations of elitism or simple fear of the new and the different. Drawing on his own experiences growing up and working at the more radical edges of the arts, this book is a timely defence of pretentiousness as a necessity for innovation and diversity in our culture.
Dan Fox is a writer, filmmaker and musician. He is the author of Limbo (2018) and Pretentiousness: Why it Matters (2016), and is the co-director of the BBC film Other, Like Me (2020). For twenty years he was an editor and staff writer at Frieze magazine, and his essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications and journals. He is based in New York.