Nonfiction
‘You May Also Like’ and ‘Pretentiousness: Why It Matters’
By JENNIFER SZALAIMAY 10, 2016pays a lot of attention to Bourdieu...
"The metaphors we use to describe what offends our sensibilities frequently involve the body, as if our dislike lies beyond the realm of reason and explanation, which it very often does. Even when we do articulate why we abhor something, words have a hard time capturing the force with which one’s entire being might revolt when faced with the offending song or novel or film."
“Pop history is littered with pretentious follies, with ambitious projects overreaching themselves.”
"The typical use of “pretentious” as a pejorative assumes that the pretentious person is uninterested in other people, and wants only to lord his rarefied tastes over the plebes; Fox, though, is trying to open up a conversation about art rather than shut it down. If anything, he says, it’s the person who uses “pretentious” as an insult who may be the less tolerant one: “The pretentious flaws of others affirm your own intellectual or aesthetic expertise. Simultaneously, their fakery highlights the contours of your down-to-earth character and virtuous ordinariness.”
"tastes feel important because of everything that goes into them — class, education, upbringing — making them the embodiment of where we were from, and where we want to be. He is also self-aware, allowing for the question of whether his own teenage aspirations were as pure as they might have seemed to him at the time: “But doesn’t all that daydreaming imply a snobbery of geography that equates the small town with the small mind and the big city with promises of success and creative self-realization?”
"Taste might seem like the ultimate in, yes, pretentious topics, far removed from the concrete realities of how we actually live, but it’s part of how we take in the world, the filter that shapes our immediate reactions before conscious deliberations begin. To try to understand someone else’s tastes, as well as our own, is the first step in an arduous but necessary path in a democracy like ours, whether we like it or not."
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