Pretentiousness: Why it Matters

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What is pretentiousness Why are we afraid of it And more controversially: why is it vital to a thriving culture Dan Fox argues that pretentiousness is the engine oil of culture; that it has always been an essential lubricant in the development of the arts, from the most wildly successful pop music and fashion through to the most recondite avenues of literature and the visual arts. Demonstrating how pretentiousness forms part of daily life, Fox's first book aims to ignite a lively debate about public discourse around the arts, advocating critical imagination and open-mindedness over knee-jerk accusations of elitism or simple fear of the new and the different. Drawing on the author's 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.

Reviews

'Dan Fox makes a very good case for a re-evaluation of the word "pretentious". The desire to be more than we are shouldn't be belittled. Meticulously researched, persuasively argued where would we be as a culture if no-one was prepared to risk coming across as pretentious Absolument nowhere, darling that's where.'
Jarvis Cocker

Pretentiousness: Why It Matters is more than a smartly counterintuitive encomium: its a lucid and impassioned defence of thinking, creating and, ultimately, living in a world increasingly dominated by the massed forces of social and intellectual conservatism. I totally loved the book.
Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation

Dan Foxs book celebrates the art in artifice, the lets pretend in pretentiousness, arriving at an eloquent, important understanding of how culture has always provided an escape from the dreariness of routine work and productive life. Exhaustively researched and passionately written, recognizing those who audaciously pretend to beauty beyond their present means, Pretentiousness is a deeply optimistic and affirming book.'
Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

In tackling so directly a term pretentiousness that has been thrown around too lightly for too long, Dan Fox has opened a fascinating, illuminating and barely glimpsed before perspective onto both culture and criticism. With clarity and persuasive argument he proves from an etymological basis that pretentiousness can be both good and bad necessary even to cultural and artistic good health. This insightful book should be read like a contemporary reprise of an eighteenth-century essay on critical manners, for it shares with such texts the winning combination of wit, good sense and intellectual rigour.
Michael Bracewell, author ofEngland is Mine

Epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, and veritable. Pretentiousness will never look the same.
Elif Batuman, author ofEither/Or

It would be too much to say that Fox has ended the reckless use of pretentious as a bludgeon against the unfamiliar, but whoever readsPretentiousnesswill come away with a greater appreciation for art, ambition, exploration, and failure.
Josh Cook,Los Angeles Review of Books

All art aspires to something it cannot achieve. All art is pretentious. And that is a good thing.... Foxs brief and elegantly righteous essay on pretentiousness is definitely on the side of the angels.
Steven Poole,Guardian

Author Bio

Dan Fox is co-editor offriezeand is based in New York.