Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - You are so Pretentious

Episode Date: September 20, 2016

Writer Dan Fox wants to reclaim the word pretentious. Take it back from those who use it like a stick to beat down the curious and the adventurous.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called You Are So Pretentious. When you start unpacking this word pretentious and this idea of pretension, you know, out scuttles all kinds of like creepy crawlies of anxieties and fears and neuroses about class privilege, anti-intellectualism, our attitudes to authenticity and being true and honest and transparent in the world. Dan Fox is a writer, a musician, and the author of a new book called Pretentiousness, Why It Matters. Being one of the editors of the contemporary art magazine Freeze, Dan overhears accusations of pretentiousness all the time. Now and then it's even personal, but he can take it. He's been dealing with this insult

ever since he was a child. I grew up in a small village in Oxfordshire in England, a place called Wheatley. It's one of those villages where on the one hand it's very kind of pretty and it's got lots of nice old historical buildings but it's also quite small-minded in lots and lots of ways and I always felt as if I was a little bit unusual in that village. I was very arty, I was into you know making drawings and paintings and reading, playing music, all things that were very much encouraged by my family, but were the kind of things you sort of had to hide when you were out amongst the other kids. It's not that Lil Dan Fox was shy. It's just that when he did share his love for French new wave films and experimental

music, he would get called pretentious, which was confusing because at home he was encouraged by his parents and his older brothers to pursue his interests and embrace his passions. And plus, this was when the BBC was really living up to its cultural mandate. It was a great time to have an open and curious mind. So, for instance, when I was about 14 or 15, I was really sick in bed, like a really terrible flu. I had the radio in my room tuned to BBC Radio 3, which is the classical music wing of the BBC.

I thought somehow this might soothe my fevered brow. But at the time, Radio 3 was broadcasting a John Cage season they're playing this very very you know difficult esoteric John Cage piece with um using prepared piano you know where he put the nuts and bolts and various things on the piano strings and it kind of makes all sorts of ping sort of atonal sounds. In my fever, I was sort of both almost kind of scared of it, but also really attracted to it. I'm sure I was very precocious and probably, you know,

a bit irritating as a teenager with these kind of interests. But it always seemed really, really sincere to me why I was into this kind of interests. But it always seemed really, really sincere to me why I was into this kind of thing. Eventually, though, Dan figured it out. People get very, very upset by certain parts of culture, you know, that's so upset that they might accuse someone of being pretentious. That is, you know, pretending to be something they're not or thinking that they're better than someone else

for their interest in, you know, I don't know, black and white movies with subtitles or their interest in, you know, listening to John Cage. After high school, Dan left Wheatley. He went to art school, found his tribe. Today, he's fully entrenched in the art world. Like I said, he's one of the editors of Freeze magazine. But the specter of pretentiousness still haunted him. And so he decided to figure out why.

I got interested in why this word pretentious was always being flung at things that I was very much interested in. Like, you know, work that to a lot of people's eyes might seem esoteric or strange or completely opaque, and how that seemed to be at odds with all the people I knew making that stuff. All the people I've been to art school with, my fellow students and the people that taught me, all my friends who are artists and writers, they're all engaged in making this work really sincerely. So a lot of people I know are often riding those accusations of pretension. They're often at the receiving end of them, myself included. And I wanted to get to the bottom of what it was that really, really upset people or gets people so wound up about the variety of things that artists and writers and musicians make. There's really no better place to launch an investigation into pretentiousness than the art world.

Contemporary art is a real flashpoint. It's a real lightning rod for accusations of pretension. And that's for quite a number of reasons. Quite often the very language of art, the language around it, is quite opaque. You know, there's a lot of people who work professionally in the art world that write about it and talk about it in very technical ways. There's a lot of jargon and a lot of language that's quite hard to understand unless you're kind of educated in it. And then also just the venues in which we encounter a lot of modern art can be quite intimidating. You know, there are these austere white painted museums with lots of sans serif signage.

And we're made to feel that, you know, these objects are kind of incredibly special and, you know, we must venerate them. And that can be really, really off-putting to people. And also, you know, it can be irritating too. And I'm saying that as a professional in the arts world of 17 years. But no one is fighting over white walls or artist statements. The stakes are way higher. With the arts, some things are recorded more financial value than others. And it's quite hard often to figure out why certain things are more

valuable than other things. This is where this idea of pretension comes in in a very, very volatile way, because it's about what we feel we can afford to take part in or what parts of culture we feel we have access to economically. Pretentiousness, Dan Fox says, has become weaponized. It's used not only to disabuse people of their passions and interests, but even more so, it's used to enforce class boundaries. When you hear the word pretentious used as an accusation, it's used in quite a damaging and negative way. It's often used as a way of policing people out of their curiosity about the world.

And it's used as a stick with which to kind of beat people. You're telling someone that they can't get above their station, that they must stay true to their social background, to their economic background, to whatever background that is, and that they're not allowed to move beyond it. Dan told me that making sense of the class issues and how they work differently and mean different things in England versus America was one of the more challenging aspects of his investigation. have around that in the UK, because that's something I've experienced firsthand. And I feel like I understand a lot more deeply than I do here in the USA, where my experience of this culture is a lot more limited. You know, I live in New York City, which is itself is, you know,

a very different part of the USA to lots of parts of the USA. And, you know, I didn't grow up here and I didn't, you know, have a kind of a long experience of what class means here in the USA. And, you know, I didn't grow up here and I didn't, you know, have a kind of a long experience of what class means here in the USA. So it's a very difficult thing for me to grapple with here. And which is why largely in the book, I sort of lean more towards British examples, because I felt that rather ironically, it would have been pretentious of me to put myself forward as an expert in American class issues. That said, Dan clearly grasps the American situation, our contempt for ideas and those who have them.

In America, the issue of pretension runs into a longer tradition of anti-intellectualism, a long history of suspicion of those who deal in ideas. You know, America is a place where a great many people have come in order to set up their ideal version of society, and be that based on, you know, political views or religious views. And throughout that history, a great many of those people have been quite ideological about it, that they believe this is the one true way we have to kind of lead our life. And intellectuals come along and they say, well, hang on. Yeah, that's an idea, but there might be another way of looking at it. Or, well,

hang on. I think that, you know, your view of how you want society to run is a bit flawed. That's what an intellectual's job is. That's what a thinking person's job is, is to cast doubt on the world, to kind of, to criticise it. And I think that out of that has grown a suspicion of the intellectual, the suspicion of the person with an education, the suspicion of a person who is able to use language in order to undermine your view of the world. So to call someone pretentious is a way of saying that, hang on, you're being an egghead, you're being a boffin. Okay, we don't use the word boffin here, but still, he's dead on. There's a kind of almost embarrassed arrogance

that comes with the accusation of pretension rather than approach the world with a curiosity and ask of it if you don't know what's going on ask well what does this mean why did this person make this thing this way you just call it pretentious and that just that's it it shuts it down it slams it slams the door shut you're just saying well obviously this isn't this isn't proper culture. This isn't something that I should take seriously. And I think that there's something very, very damaging about that. Dan Fox wants to reclaim the word pretentiousness, rescue it from those who have misused it. And he believes pop music can show us how this can be done.

Once you start looking at the history of late 20th century pop music, you can see that there are so many examples of unusual ideas being pulled in. You know, you look at, say, someone like Kate Bush, who had a huge number one hit with Wuthering Heights, a song about a 19th century novel. Or you might look at a band like Talking Heads, who sang about animal consciousness or the idea of civil war in the USA. And you look at a band like Skritty Politti, who had a big hit with a song about

Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher. There are these really, really often quite complex and out there ideas floating through the channels of pop music. Pop music was this field in which you could put the world together in any way you wanted. You could pull from all kinds of different sources and put them together from fashion, from literature, from movies, from art, put it together and refashion the world in your own eyes. And that seemed like a very, very liberating and hugely, hugely creative endeavor for me.

When Dan was a kid, he would flip through his brother's records. He didn't even need to put them on. The images on the front covers and the notes on the back were themselves gateways to other worlds. Flipping through my brother's record collection and coming across a David Bowie record and looking at it, looking at the sleeve and then looking at the back and, you know, there might be a mention of The Velvet Underground and then wondering who on earth is The Velvet Underground and then looking it up and or asking my brother and then finding out that this was a rock band from New York City who were supported by this visual artist called Andy Warhol.

So who's Andy Warhol? And then, you know, I'd follow a path from there. Or I might see, you know, a documentary on TV about Bowie and how he wrote his lyrics and the cut-up technique he used, which was from William Burroughs. And so I'd find myself thinking, so who's William Burroughs? And I'd go into a bookstore and I'd look at William Burroughs, and so I'd find myself thinking, so who's William Burroughs? And I'd go into a bookstore and I'd look at William Burroughs and then find out more about him and about the beats and about American underground literature.

So a lot of my starting off points were from records, basically. Of course, he did listen to the music. But one of the great things about pop music too is that it also makes you dance and it makes you feel things in a very, very visceral way. One of the great things about Bowie was that he could take you from the dance floor to the library and it didn't really matter which way you went.

There is total joy in the visceral, hedonistic pleasures of pop music as much as there are in the more intellectual side of it. And for Dan, the musician who taught him the most about the positive potential of pretension, the artist who can show us all how it can be done, is David Bowie. David Bowie helps us understand what pretentiousness is. In that he came from a very ordinary background

and transformed himself into this extraordinary rock star, this icon of late 20th century pop culture. He was an autodidact. He brought together in his work ideas from across the cultural spectrum, across the creative spectrum, from avant-garde literature to mime to European arthouse cinema. And he put those together in ways that were both very personal, which spoke to people about their own sense of difference or being misfits, but in ways that were also, you know, quite, they're incredibly inventive, they're incredibly creative, that were hugely, hugely popular as well. And I think that he's an interesting example of productive and popular pretension at work.

He was deliberately embracing artifice. He was embracing joy and pleasure in dressing up, in pretending to be something else, in exploring new and different worlds. And he was also hugely successful at it. You know, he was adored across the world by millions of people. And I think that if that's pretentious, then I think that's a very, very positive example of pretension in the world at work. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called You Are So Pretentious. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Dan Fox.

I can't recommend his new book enough. It's why we devoted a whole episode to it. Stay tuned for a new Theory of Everything miniseries starting next episode. It's something I've been working on for almost a year now, and I can't wait for you to hear it. The Theory of Everything is a founding member of Radiotopia, the world's best podcast network collective. I hope you have all of us programmed into your listening device. Radiotopia, the world's best podcast network collective. I hope you have all of us programmed into your listening device. Radiotopia's launch sponsors are the Knight Foundation, MailChimp, and listeners

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