This book was everything I never knew I wanted. I first stumbled upon it in an Economist review, and I was immediately hooked by it's references to both Edmund Burke and David Bowie - two men that have had a profound impact on my own life. So imagine my delight when I found out a book about pretension was anything but false regarding my expectations for it.
A lot of questions and thoughts I've had relating to authenticity, sincerity, experience, social media, politics, language, perception, sociology, and art in the past few months are all somehow wonderfully addressed, consolidated, and synthesized into one bite-sized essay. It's chock-full of allusions, references, and examples to support it's (unsurprising) thesis that "pretentiousness" matters. From both the classics to the contemporary, from Plato to the Velvet Underground, Fox effortlessly moves back and forth between the "high" and "low" art forms in his essay to build a solid case for why we should redefine our outlook on pretension and to celebrate rather than criticize such an adjective. It is exactly the type of book I wish I had written first.
And if all of that wasn't enough, (Fox's extremely high opinion of Bowie as a "British national treasure" instantly verified to me his authority to speak about art), the post script at the end spoke to me on a spiritual level. To have someone from a small town who moved to the "big city" find solace in the works of the exact same musicians I love, films I've admired, and books I've devoured, to understand the hopes and motivations for why anyone would take a chance in the art world in a sprawling metropolis, and to so flawlessly and effortlessly convey what I've struggled to understand for the past few years, moved me immensely. My new life goal is to one day meet Fox on the streets of New York. 5/5.
Bonus: Two of my favourite quotes about Bowie found in the work
"Attitudes change. Eventually the so-called pretender's work finds itself in the canon of Important Works of Art, and the folk devil becomes the icon of rebelion, celebrated for sticking it to The Man. The works of post-impressionist painters, regarded in their day as difficult and radical, are today reproduced on table mats, tote bags, and posters hung in dentist waiting rooms. Musician David Bowie recalled that "in the 1960s nobody thought I would be successful, because I was too avant-garde." Today, Bowie is a British national treasure, with museum exhibitions and entire evenings of BBC TV dedicated to his career."
"One need only look at Eno's friend Bowie to see pretentiousness in action. He was deliberate. "In my early stuff, I made it through on sheer pretension," he said in a 1976 interview with Playboy. "Show someone something where intellectual analysis or analytical thought has been applied and people will yawn. But something that's pretentious - that keeps you riveted." Bowie borrowed from mime, kabuki, the Beats, Andy Warhol, science fiction, high fashion, modern European art, and theater. He created personae and atmospheres that served as a refuge in fantasy for misfit teenagers, temporary flights of imagination from life in some godforsaken 1970s new town. "Don't fake it baby / Lay the real thing on me," sang Bowie, but that "real thing" could take you from the boondocks to the moon and back, by way of London, Tokyo, and Berlin. It was wildly popular music that - in songs such as "Life on Mars" and "Rebel rebel" - paradoxically provided solace to loners, outsiders, those who didn't feel part of the crowd. Notes on the back of a Bowie sleeve could lead you to The Velvet Underground, its front cover to the German expressionists, and for those growing up in the high modern phase of pop - roughly from the late 1960s until the early '90s - a form of cultural literacy was nurtured through references found on album artwork or in music videos. There were spaces that encouraged curiosity, gateways to art, literature, radical politics, and cinema."
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