Who is Pretentious?

Pretension, Passion, & Embracing Honestly Bad Art

Still from Saltburn (2023), a movie I admittedly found entertaining and fun (though not groundbreaking). Photo from MGM and Amazon Studios.

The word has likely rolled around in your mind or off the tip of your tongue at some point. Perhaps it was after sitting through a student-produced dance show at a prestigious liberal arts school. Or after mulling over a cult classic novel or indie album your friend raved about. You may have watched a movie beloved by the “film bro” community after reading a Reddit thread about it and felt more unsatisfied post-viewing than anticipated. Perhaps you felt bad about thinking or saying it. Perhaps the work just left a bad taste in your mouth and you couldn’t think of another descriptor.

Certain words and concepts are challenging to define because they simply are what they are. Ironic, satirical, campy - these qualities are often best illustrated via examples rather than words in a dictionary. Once we know their meaning intrinsically, they become difficult to define for another person. People write dense texts that are closely read for years, grasping at some objective semblance of qualities that can feel so known without words. I would contend that pretentious falls in this camp.

“Pretentious,” like many words, has seemed to shift in meaning in its contemporary usages. In recent situations, I’ve used and witnessed the word being used as a kind of catch-all descriptor for media that attempts to appear loftier than it actually is. When work is described as pretentious, it usually carries a kind of “holier-than-thou” air. Perhaps it’s excessively gaudy or simple. It’s vibrantly adorned to cloak any discernable substance or left too barren to extrapolate anything pleasurable or significant. We describe work as pretentious when it’s clear that the artist thinks very highly of themselves. The artist is lifted higher by their inflated regard for their own abilities - we usually assume they’re close-minded to criticism. Sometimes we simply use the word to describe art and ideas we just don’t like or understand - at least upon our first consumption. “Heady” is often used in tandem with “pretentious,” alluding to the dizzy, drunken-like state that dense art can put one in while trying to determine the roots of its opaque themes. I’ve seen “pretentious” conflated with “obnoxious” or “passionate.”

Most poignantly: we think work is pretentious when we think it is deceptive, attempting to present itself in a way it simply isn’t, seemingly any way you slice it. Pretentious work looks and sounds more intelligent and sophisticated than it actually is. As such, I can see why people who deliberate art on the internet are often branded with the adjective. Engrossed with passion for movies, music, food, and just about any other niche you can think of, internet users symbolically enter combat when expressing a favorable or dissenting opinion about a piece of work they feel strongly about. They toss around assumptions about those who disagree and bounce judgments off the judgments thrown their way. All of this can feel mighty pretentious because of the lowly setting in which it’s occurring: an internet forum, a sub-Reddit, a Twitter thread. 

This is not a long-form debate transpiring in a salon or nineteenth-century coffee house. It’s a culmination of quick quips strung together via a thin digital thread. Increasingly, it appears that users engage in these heated debates of taste and thought to ultimately be the one that lands the final blow and reigns intellectually and artistically superior. In “The Discourse Age,”

eliza mclamb

discusses this type of lofty discussion mode on Twitter in a form she aptly refers to as “discourse bait” - the practice of making an outlandish claim online for the sake of stoking a fire among other users. Centering a tweet about the beauty of using a journal to its maximum capacity, McLamb zooms out, analyzing quote tweets layer by layer. One user asserts that there is an essay to be written about the “commodification” of journaling as performed digital introspection. Another user dunks on the second user, claiming there’s an essay to be written about saying you’ll write an essay about a digital phenomenon as performed intelligence. As you continue zooming out, you’ll find increasingly lofty commentary, each user striving to appear more thoughtful, clever, and genuine than the last.

Screenshots from the Twitter interaction in question in Eliza’s piece.

We are all trying to be something we’re not online - to an extent. We’re performing, attempting deception in small and big ways. And by definition, I guess we are being pretentious. For The Guardian, Dan Fox writes that “authenticity” is thought to be the antithesis of pretentiousness. Amid a culture that claims to value honesty and justice above all else, pretentiousness can emerge as a moral sin of sorts. “If being authentic is considered a virtue – what we should strive to be in society – then being pretentious is considered a cover-up, a face-palm to your background,” Fox writes.

Lately, I’ve been feeling curious about my own relationship to pretentiousness, as a producer and consumer of media - much of which is digital media. My newsletter, for example, often centers my opinions about popular media and internet phenomena - why do I think I have the authority to speak on these things? Am I too falling prey to “discourse bait,” striving to perform intelligence via essays? Am I attempting to deceive my audience, tricking them into thinking I’m more qualified or intelligent than I actually am? The source of these questions is, in part, personal insecurity. But I’m also undoubtedly impacted by the array of back-and-forths I witness online and how quickly they can derail into a kind of unfounded peacocking display. What differentiates me? These questions can ultimately lead one to the final, more existential, inquiry which is: why write? And by extension, why express?

Fox argues that “pretension never self-identifies,” meaning it’s impossible to diagnose yourself with the quality because of how absorbed you are in what you’re passionate about. We all have an interest that we’ve hyper-fixated on to a degree. A subject of which we can’t help but have strong feelings and opinions, whether we express them aloud or not. I suppose this is, in part, where the source of pretension lies for many - when someone has strong opinions about something we consider superfluous to think deeply about. 

For example, I recently got a new espresso machine in my apartment - one in which you pull the espresso shot from the coffee grounds yourself. This is far more complex than the good old reliable, press-and-forget Keurig, Nespresso, or other types of “pod” machines I’m used to. The first couple cups of coffee I made with the machine were admittedly quite bad. The espresso was either thin and watery or thick and bitter - never quite right. One “how to pull an espresso shot” Google search later and I had entered the labyrinthine world of online coffee connoisseurs. I quickly learned the many variables involved in pulling the perfect espresso shot: allowing your machine to heat up to the right temperature, weighing your beans before and after grinding them, timing the espresso extraction, and much more. This overwhelmed me slightly, as someone who likes her morning coffee made quickly and consistently. After playing around with the machine’s settings and adopting a couple of strategies I learned online, I’ve found a method that works for my coffee standards, but it might horrify some of the ardent coffee lovers in this online network I stumbled across.

I don’t want to take the time to measure my beans every morning - I’m fine with drinking coffee that may be slightly lackluster as a result. I might be quick to call these coffee enthusiasts snobby or pretentious because I don’t see the point of putting the kind of effort they do into a daily cup of coffee. But, there are other realms in which I exude an equivalent effort, one of which is, ironically, another breakfast item: oatmeal. If you know me in real life, you know that I have strong feelings about my morning oatmeal. Steel-cut oats are texturally superior, as are peanut butter, honey, and chopped nuts as toppings (chopped, not sliced!). I will stir the oats on my stove for the 15-20 minutes it takes to cook them instead of purchasing the instant variety because the difference in quality is worth the extra time. The peanut butter has to be dalloped in small spoonfuls across the oatmeal’s surface instead of a giant spoonful in the middle, so it can be consumed in every bite. These are musts!

We’re wrong to conflate passion with pretension. Sure, people can be passionate about creating ingenious work, but the passion itself isn’t the source of the pretension. Similar to Fox, in my eyes, the antithesis of pretentiousness is honesty. Sincerity. There is a difference between attempting deceit and creating work that is unapologetically itself, but sincerely bad. I often have more respect for the latter because it usually contains more fervor. I’m inspired by artists who swing big - who have piles of honestly atrocious and not-so-good work alongside their great wins. Such artists are far more interesting than those who try to skirt by, masking their lack of intention behind a facade.

There are works of art and ideas in this world that are murky and dishonest - some even primarily made to bolster one’s ego - and there are others that we simply don’t like personally - sometimes the two overlap, sometimes they don’t. Parsing out which work falls in both or either camp might aid our experience as art consumers and producers, and may even help us learn a thing or two about what lights up our own minds. It’s a gift to have people in this world who feel so strongly about something as routine as a cup of coffee, while others feel as passionately about the cut of a T-shirt, the design of sidewalks, or a bowl of oatmeal. People who can feel so strongly about a craft and concept that they teeter on the line of madness. A world without such people - in any sector - would be far less vibrant. We would certainly have far more banal cups of coffee.

A perfect bowl of oatmeal I made once. This one had blueberries, plums, and almonds (yum!). Photo by my boyfriend.

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For more on a similar topic, check out my essays Is Having Good Taste Overrated? and Should People Be Allowed to Like Things?