I agree with the sentiment: calling people/their interests/art pretentious is often an accusation that betrays one’s own lack of intellectual curiosity. This essay mainly focuses on if people weren’t ‘pretentious’ then we wouldn’t have x, y, z cool things, which, sure. But I do think those are two different things. Fox’s discussion on class and elitism also felt a bit disingenuous. How a person is marginalized by society has to be taken into account in a meaningful way when it comes to understanding their interactions with culture, and how their knowledge and opinions of said culture forms.

It would be more interesting to further the conversation on anti-intellectualism, the marketplace, and how much of mass market entertainment not only appeals to the lowest common denominator, but also has dangerous implications, e.g. Marvel and their military propaganda.

I’m also thinking of this Fran Lebowitz interview where she says:

Yes, society should be fair, yes, society should give everyone a chance, it should be more equal, but it’s not true of the culture. The culture is not the society. We have way too much democracy in the culture and way too little in the society. But in order to make these judgments, you have to agree or believe that some things are better than others.

I believe in this one, or maybe another interview, Lebowitz also talks about the cultural devastation the AIDs epidemic had in that it killed a lot of tastemakers, artists, critics, et cetera, and this has in part led to a lot of bad art being made. The importance of a discerning audience cannot be understated enough, and I do think people have to be okay with certain things being called bad art, and admitting they solely exist as capitalistic pursuits (I liked the line at the end, “Literature is not the same as publishing”).

★★★✮☆ (3.5 stars)

i think this book really starts to pick up at around the halfway point, particularly in its discussions surrounding art; i found the commentary on the origins of the term a little bit less compelling, maybe even disjointed or unorganized at times. it is also repetitive - something that became especially apparent when i looked back at the bookmarks i'd made. altogether, though, it's an interesting investigation into pretentiousness (and our very pretensions surrounding it)