The Problem with "Pretentious"
The Problem with "Pretentious"
Why I try to avoid a particular adjective.
This past Friday, my wife and I went to see Alexandria Bombach’s new documentary Indigo Girls: It’s Only Life After All. It was a great experience (the showing was at the Tara, Bombach and the Indigo Girls did a Q&A after the film, and then Amy Ray and Emily Saliers performed a couple songs), and the documentary itself does a good job of exploring not only the history of the duo, but also their place in American culture. At one point in the documentary, Ray and Saliers read a particularly nasty review they received in The New York Times in 1989 from music critic Jon Pareles. The review is dripping with sexism and disdain, but one particular element jumped out to me as a critic. In the first sentence, Pareles cites the Indigo Girls for “Earnestness pretentiousness,” and then at the start of the fourth paragraph says, “Each Indigo Girl has a slightly differet [sic] style of pretension.”
I’ve always strived to avoid using the word “pretentious” in my criticism simply because it’s a poor word for describing art. To employ “pretentious” correctly, you need to then say what the artist is “pretending” to be with their art. There are times when this is applicable, but more often than not, it fails because artists typically believe in what they’re doing. If the artist wanted to do something different, they would, and while there are certainly cynical attempts to cash grab off a trend, even there you would need evidence to show that the art was disingenuous. The key problem with Pareles citing the Indigo Girls as “earnest pretentiousness” is that he has no evidence of their phoniness because none exists. Maybe if Ray and Saliers were obnoxious yuppies trying to cash in on youth culture it would apply, but they clearly aren’t, and that would have been apparent even in 1989 when Pareles wrote his article.
What Pareles and others who use “pretentious” mean isn’t inauthenticity, but rather unabashed, unironic artiness. And look—if earnestness isn’t your thing, that’s fine! But that’s what you have to say. You as the viewer have to own up to the fact that a particular tone is a personal taste rather than the artist failing to achieve their goal. There are other words to describe one’s own contempt for this thing, but “pretentious” is the wrong one.
“Pretentious” can also mean, “I didn’t get it,” which again, doesn’t really fit as a criticism. There are better ways to make this claim like “obtuse” or “circuitous,” or saying outright, “I didn’t find the material worth the mental taxation necessary to unpack the subtext the artist is aiming for,” but “pretentious” is a cop-out word on which the artist is faulted for attempting anything that isn’t readily apparent. It’s also not particularly helpful since if what you mean is “I didn’t understand it,” you’re implying that others will find the work equally impenetrable, which may not be the case.
This isn’t to say that we should simply run to “everything’s subjective,” and call it a day, but rather than lazy criticism like what Pareles employed here fails to understand not only the Indigo Girls but Pareles’ own place as a listener. Reading his full review, there’s a terse dismissiveness of the Indigo Girls’ sheer existence. And look—when Pareles wrote this, he had only been at the Times for a year, and he was a guy in his mid-30s who, in the late 80s, perhaps felt no compulsion to try and understand where the Indigo Girls were coming from. And maybe he’s different now, and he wishes he had written a different review (I know I certainly look back at some of my old reviews and cringe).
But reading Pareles’ review is a good reminder that when we deploy criticisms, especially ones relying on overused words like “pretentious” we need to back up our arguments rather than simply cast aspersions. If we’re going to say we don’t like something, we need to try a little harder than “artsy in a way that offends my sensibilities.”