Dan Fox makes a very good case for a re-evaluation of the word pretentious. The desire to be more than we are shouldn't be belittled. Meticulously researched, persuasively argued where would we be as a culture if no-one was prepared to risk coming across as pretentious?Absolumentnowhere, darling thats where.
Jarvis Cocker
Pretentiousness: Why It Mattersis more than a smartly counterintuitive encomium: its a lucid and impassioned defence of thinking, creating and, ultimately, living in a world increasingly dominated by the massed forces of social and intellectual conservatism. I totally loved the book.
Tom McCarthy, author ofSatin Island
Dan Foxs book celebrates the art in artifice, the lets pretend in pretentiousness, arriving at an eloquent, important understanding of how culture has always provided an escape from the dreariness of routine work and productive life. Exhaustively researched and passionately written, recognizing those who audaciously pretend to beauty beyond their present means,Pretentiousnessis a deeply optimistic and affirming book.'
Chris Kraus, author ofI Love Dick
In tackling so directly a term pretentiousness that has been thrown around too lightly for too long, Dan Fox has opened a fascinating, illuminating and barely glimpsed before perspective onto both culture and criticism. With clarity and persuasive argument he proves from an etymological basis that pretentiousness can be both good and bad necessary even to cultural and artistic good health. This insightful book should be read like a contemporary reprise of an eighteenth-century essay on critical manners, for it shares with such texts the winning combination of wit, good sense and intellectual rigour.
Michael Bracewell, author ofEngland is Mine
Epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, and veritable. Pretentiousness will never look the same.
Elif Batuman, author ofEither/Or
It would be too much to say that Fox has ended the reckless use of pretentious as a bludgeon against the unfamiliar, but whoever readsPretentiousnesswill come away with a greater appreciation for art, ambition, exploration, and failure.
Josh Cook,Los Angeles Review of Books
All art aspires to something it cannot achieve. All art is pretentious. And that is a good thing.... Foxs brief and elegantly righteous essay on pretentiousness is definitely on the side of the angels.
Steven Poole,Guardian
