I loathe this post-modern superficiality where nothing can ever take itself serious and everything always has to be ironic and self-distancing. No, actually I like it. Tarantino is fun. But I hate it when that is all there can be, and the exact moment somebody tries for something else, he immediately gets labelled pretentious. Pretentious my ass.
More pretentiousness! More!
Ok that was rambling, and I also kind of hate “disingenuous”. What the fuck is it with that? Do we have to be ingenuous every wake second of our life. Or god help me, am I a fool for having disingenuous dreams?!
I don’t think “pretentious” means what you think it means, or is used commonly enough that way to bitch about it much.
Irony as a posture can be extremely pretentious.
Most serious people are totally genuine.
A pretentious person imitates the superficial form of something they have no depth of understanding about and pretends to be an authority on it.
“Trying for something else” can come off as pretentious, if you’ve just got your feet wet and are passing yourself off as a great artist. Poetry isn’t pretentious – but broken verse full of trite imagery delivered in your very best Jack Keroauc voice is.
Certainly I’ll agree with you this far: People who dismiss something that’s too sophisticated for them to understand as “pretentious” are pretentious.