Author(s): Dan Fox

Theory

Pretentiousness is for anyone who has braved being different, whether that's making a stand against artistic consensus or running the gauntlet of the last bus home dressed differently from everyone else. It's an essential ingredient in pop music and high art. Why do we choose accusations of elitism over open-mindedness? What do our anxieties about "pretending" say about us?

Co-editor of frieze, Europe's foremost magazine of contemporary art and culture, Dan Fox has authored over two hundred essays, interviews, and reviews and contributed to numerous catalogues and publications produced by major international art galleries and institutions.

“What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like but how it was made.” - Harry G. Frankfurt. To be pretentious is to seek to be something other than what one is, which seems in some ways a core function (or a core risk) of any model of creativity. According to Fox, the pretentious is that which seeks to break free of suffocating mores in society and in the arts, and is quite correctly seen as an assault on the stability of those mores (which are patrolled by snobs (investors in the status quo)). In this essay, to pretend is not only a rejection of the authentic but also the means of moving towards a new (or deeper) authenticity. This simultaneity of authenticity and inauthenticity provides for a fluidity of identity which is both the reward and the hazard of creative pursuits. I am not entirely confident that many examples of pretentiousness are in fact not nobly overthrowing the structures of the status quo but rather reinforcing those structures by fluidly attempting to belong in an inauthentic place within them. This book will provoke some good discussions.

{THOMAS}