Can ART be pretentious?

xpost Hi Mr. Pedant!

xpost I defined it that way in the process tying to make a very simple explanation of an average person. you jumped from talking about an average person to talking about my definition of an artist. I wasn't even trying to define it. Fine. Anyone who ever shat and thought their turds looked interesting is an artist. Now I never said that ALL artist are pretentious, but that the nature of art itself lends itself more to pretension than, say, eviscerating chickens. This is not a hard concept to comprehend and I really don't see how anyone---well, anyone who doesn't love to argue just for the hell of it---could argue that.

You'd be a lot better at the bait-and-switch if you weren't so clumsy at it

well DUHstencil.

"Average person" cannot be defined. It's a loose concept, and one I think we are all familiar with and have used from time to time. The average person has 2.2 kids. This does not mean that your all your friends in Manhattan have 2.2 kids. The average person eats 50lbs of beef a year. This does not mean that you or anyone else eats 50lbs of beef a year. The average person works for a living, but the average person is not an artist.

What did you mean by the bit about art by definition being pretentious?

I chose to limit the argument to professional artists because they presumably play the role of artist more often and see themselves as artists moreso than others.

but I understand your rationale, even if I don't agree with it (what about "selling out, dude?!?")

This:

"Average person" cannot be defined. It's a loose concept, and one I think we are all familiar with and have used from time to time. The average person has 2.2 kids. This does not mean that your all your friends in Manhattan have 2.2 kids. The average person eats 50lbs of beef a year. This does not mean that you or anyone else eats 50lbs of beef a year. The average person works for a living, but the average person is not an artist.

completely proves the point I was making, in that your "average person" is not absolutist as you perceive it to be, but entirely situational as everything you listed your "average person" as doing is maybe applicable to pretty much only the United States. The "average person" of the world more than likely doesn't do any of those things you list, although I definitely cede that the "average person" of the world is not an artist, sure.

Again with the gratuitous ad-hom. I'd like to see the inverse of your last statement become true on some bright shining day: if you are insane, you don't think you are a nit-picking pedant. I've overpassed my bedtime, and you overpassed yours long ago, so goodnight, godbless.

I said my argument as bluntly as possible. This was basically the entirety of my argument. But you didn't even respond to it! You just went on and on about "but what exactly is the 'average person', when it wasn't even germane to the subject at hand. Yes, I brought the term up but you harped on it and other insignificant points rather than, you know, actually discussing things.

Pretension: n. 1. (often plural) a false or unsupportable claim, esp. to merit, worth or importance. 2. a specious or unfounded allegation; pretext. 3) the state or quality of being pretentious

Pretentious: adj. 1. making claim to distinction or importance, esp. undeservedly. 2. having or creating a deceptive outer appearance of great worth; ostentatious.

So, going back to the original question, yes, *all* art is pretentious, depending on your definition of "worth". At its very literal, non-intellectual core, art is useless. It's just canvas or paint or clay or film or fiberglass or formaldehyde, whatever your chosen media is. Its only worth is mental. It can entertain, stimulate, beautify, elucidate, communicate, or do any of those other things good art is supposed to do. But art can't feed you, can't put a roof over your head, can't clothe you (well, it does if we start to talk about design and couture as art, but some would debate that for the precise reason that it is *useful* and therefore not proper or "pure" art.)

The 'pretension' of art comes from the value that you place upon intellectual or mental worth. To me, good art is art that inspires, entertains, communicates, etc and performs a vital function in my intellectual life. while pretentious (or more accurately, poor) art is that pretends to inspire, but does not. Those are my values.

To put the cat among the usual pigeons - to me, football is pretentious because I cannot see the use of it. Art has an important function in my life, football is something meaningless that a lot of people put a lot of overrated value on. That, to me, is a dictionary definition of pretentious.

A lot of people, rather inaccurately, use the term "pretentious" as a bugbear catchall for the derision of the intellectual. Others use it as a signifier of "style over content". The former is incorrect, the latter is only correct if you value content to the exclusion of style. Pretentious is related to the word *pretend*. It is *not* necessarily synonymous with shallow or superficial, though the usual connotation is that of a shallow person "pretending" to be deep. A deep person pretending to be shallow can be just as pretentious.

So, anyway, to answer the question. All art is pretentious. Duh! Next question! Are artists pretentious? It depends. In my rather limited experience, the strange thing I've found is that most of the artists that I've met, are actually not pretentious at all, in fact, they are quite down to earth. People who move in the arts world but are not actually artists, crikey, they are the most pretentious people I've ever met. I don't know if it's correlation or causation or even overcompensation, but the further away from the Getting Hands Dirty of being a practising or paid artist, the more pretentious the git. Ha!

People who move in the arts world but are not actually artists, crikey, they are the most pretentious people I've ever met.

And---if 80s movies have taught me anything--- within that group you'll usually find the people who decide what is and isn't art.

And then you proceed to totally mangle the implications of the definition.

Which is:

# Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified.
# Making or marked by an extravagant outward show; ostentatious.

Now how exactly is pointing out pretension pretentious? Is pointing out a crime criminal, as well?

And when I thought about it, of course art has to be pretentious, because unless your art was a canvas that simply said "The goal of this artwork is to make you feel shame" the art would have to find a way to do so. And also, if the canvas just said that, of course, it'd STILL be pretentious, because we all know that's not what it's really about.

Discussing art is so hard, because it takes so many words that can only sort of get to it.

And I still think an artist can be pretentious, and plenty I know seem to want to fit into the "artist" archetype, although I would agree that it's also just plain silly to boot.

Well, what I was thinking, oops, was that when someone calls another person, or another person's work, pretentious they are claiming a special position or authority to judge that person or their work. Saying 'You think your work has some deep meaning but I know better it's just a load of crap' is assuming an elite, and undeserved position.

Although my dictionary has (Chambers) has "pompous, self-important or foolishly grandiose, phoney or affected", and I think saying that 'calling someone or their work phoney is pompous' is pretty reasonable.

(Decides to wait for the 115th post before appearing, so that Music Mole can win his wager and possibly split the money. Oh HELL!)

You can't talk about pretension without talking about authenticity. Runner Up therefore wins with his question (which nobody answered):

How could [artists] try to be more 4 real, do you think?

The better question is why is pretention seen as a pejorative? Why does it polarize people so much (witness oops v. hstencil)? Is pretention at all different from hip or cool, or related to it in any way?

I don't have answers. Perhaps someone else will have a go? I'm going to have lunch.

The trouble is, nobody can really agree on what's real and what true. For some, Platonists and Christians for instance, 'real and true' are things that are completely out of sight, located in some invisible and inaccessible realm. For others (scientists), they're provisional benchmarks we chalk and defend until a more plausible explanation comes along, and for others again (pragmatists) they're just whatever works. Artists (at least these days) tend to concentrate on 'What's interesting' or 'What's thought-provoking' rather than 'What's true' or 'What's real'. Therefore I think they're inherently exempt from pretension.

I'm real, I thought I told ya
I really been on Oprah

but when in the realm of nonclassical art where "worth" can be anything, the observer from a classical point of view sees little worth.

"Calling anything pretentious implies you have the ability to judge somethings worth"

A trained classical art critic does have the ability to judge the worth of classical art.

I strongly disagree with this. Are you saying that "the thing about pretention is that, for artists, that's their real culture" ? Because I disagree with that too: it implies that artists can't see anything except as artists, not as consumers or mothers or gardeners or 100 other roles.

So I think yes, artists can be pretentious, yes, art can be pretentious, but both can also be unpretentious. And definitely artists, like anyone else, can be pretentious sometimes and not at other times.

it took this long for someone to say this?! far fuckin out

but but but, whats so wrong with pretentiousness anyway, does everything have to be as practical and down to earth as the evisceration of chickens.

-- runner up (runneru...) (webmail), June 22nd, 2004 1:14 AM

The ideas of 'what is art' and 'what art is' have been permanently stained by their aesthetics. Even the revolt toward primitivism failed to dislodge them for long. It was just co-opted by the critics and dealers as neatly as you please.

What need not have negative connotations is the judging of worth, but when dealing with a humans as the audience a certain amount of human nature plays a role and through that judging things as lacking worth occurs lots.

And artists/observers ignoring human nature, discredits it. But humans really are great.

David, are you asking if someone can communicate something to someone else by making an object, or a representation of something (art, even) and then showing it to them? I think they can, in the same way that words communicate things, but with less precision than words for some things (and more precision in others, like colors or shapes or movement). But what gets communicated will change depending on how it's shown, and what the relationship is between the maker and the seer is, etc (is it shown with a smile? in the cold? at a gallery? at the dinner table?) and of course on the people involved and their prejudices and beliefs. Maybe this is obvious, and not what you're asking. If you're asking if ART ITSELF can be pretentious, it's an odd question, like the tree falling in the forest thing. Maybe I'm the wrong person to ask though, there are some telephone poles I see that lean in what I consider a kind of pretentious way.

(but is it art?)

Pretence or Pretense (both acceptable)
Pretension (not, repeat not, Pretention)
Pretentious
Pretentiously
Pretentiousness