Pretentiousness | An Essay of Great Importance
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 มี.ค. 2020
- What makes a work or a person pretentious? With all the small nuances and flavours of today's world, does such a word really say anything substantial? Is it a proper critique, or a derogatory term that says more about the sender than the recipient?
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#Pretentious #ModernArt #Auteurs - เกม
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Really nice video. Pass the Caviar, and here have a comment so the Algorithm will recommend this video more.
Some caviar coming up, darling!
12:50 Not to mention the fact that from brain to message adds distortion too. Many people don't think directly into words, but rather think abstractly and then translate those thoughts into a shared language, which may not have sufficient vocabulary to express the unlimited nuance of abstract thought.
Good thinking, friend!
There Needs to be more love for this channel.
We recommend doing rigorous sharing campaigns at relevant platforms. No, but really, thank you, it means a lot that you yourself share your love :)
@@Transparencyboo already shared multiple vids with my friends. Hope everything comes together to have this channel flourish!
Thank you, friend! You are lovely! We have some really nice support already from people like you and on patreon, more than we had even hoped for! So we think there are good possibilities for the future!
100% they work hard to give people enough substance to want to interact with the content. it is great!
I never thought of you as pretentious and I rarely give that judgment out. I however feel an intense and crushing lack of self esteem from not being smart enough or reading enough myself.
Don't worry about it too much. You do not have to read a lot to be smart. If you want to start somewhere just pick a subject and go off on it. I am sure you are clever anyway. :)
"Wholesome" games now encompass much of what would've once been called "art-games", "indie games", "non-games", or "serious games", I think. The word wholesome doesn't have that high/low class distinction in it, nor any reference to being more important than pop, or more authentic/independant. So it's natural that indie and publisher marketeers have flocked to calling non-violent, non-imperial, non-compulsive, or unconventional games just Wholesome. That leaves the artsy games that go for an edgelord or vulgar-culture style now. There's no widely liked term for those, still, is there? Also I fear maybe the term wholesome died of commercial aftertaste, as soon as it became widely used.
Perfectly said
Something I always thought but never heard it articulated before
There's a lot of stuff we'd probably change if we made this today, although I still think it's pretty neat. It has some sweet visuals if nothing else :)
*adjusts monocle*
Hmm... yes, indeed. Quite.
*sips Cognac*
Eagerly awaiting your Sonic the Hedgehog video comrade.
It is inevitable!
I have watched this video a bunch of times. I'm an architect (student), and I'm slowly moving from the more technical approach to design to the more artsy side of things. This means that I have to talk a lot more about art, and I'm struggling a lot with doing that without feeling fake or pretentious. This video, and your statement that things are only pretentious if you don't mean it, has become a motto for me, to encourage me to become more confident in talking about art and artistic intent. Your other videos are also very inspiring in this, they are never apologetic for what they are, not even for comedic effect! You take yourselves seriously even when discussing things that others might find silly, and it's a huge inspiration to me.
This is literally the best comment we have ever gotten, and it really gets us to a degree we have never seen before! Thank you!
I think that when I consider what inspires the word "pretentious" to come to mind when looking at art, it's when there's topics, themes, motifs, visuals, etc. thoughtlessly copied. Lots of writers, for example, try to make their fiction "edgy," "dangerous," "real" etc seeming by applying tragedies in a flippant way. Sad things happen in real life, therefore if my work contains sad things, it's realistic. The TV adaptation of "Game of Thrones" is probably the prime example, killing off even more characters than the books did expressly for the purpose of attempting to be "shocking" and "provocative". Pretty much every time a man writes sexual assault happening or being threatened it's got the same vibe to it, too. Horror media is extremely vulnerable to this kind of thinking as well, since the author might be tempted to use things they don't find frightening but assume their target audience is, because those elements were in other popular horror franchises. This is why every bad horror game has a mental hospital and "insane" people as enemies. Arguably you could call any "horror" media that relies on jump scares to be pretentious: They're pretending to be scary, when all they actually are is startling (the Silent Hill 3 movie having a toaster jumpscare for example)
I watched the video completely and enjoyed it, but I also wanted to make this joke and you can shame me for it later
A video essay on *looks in the description* Sonic Adventure 2 Battle? Wow, how wildly pretentious of them.
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle is some real deep stuff, truely a masterpiece of our age. You see the duality between Sonic and Shad-
We appreciate a sonic drawing we've definitely not seen before 👀
'pretentious' has become an empty word that my compulsions throw around to discourage me. but i don't know what it actually means. my mind will call anything pretentious basically at random. at worst, it's as if anything that carries itself as anything more than just a product is "pretentious" to me.
a more positive interpretation of pretention i think, is the blowfish. small in stature, not swift, not cunning. easy prey for predators, but the blowfish has a secret weapon. the blowfish puffs himself up 4 or 5 times larger than normal to make itself intimidating. for instance, i'm blowing myself up by stealing this entire metaphor and 90% of the exact words used to convey it from breaking bad.
Really fun and well-written video!
Thank you, friend! Glad you enjoyed it!
I've enjoyed several of your videos since Pam shouted you out on Cannot be tamed.
On this video I was just thinking of how one possible thing going on with the use of pretentious is a sort of attack on allegorical ways of understanding and communicating. I've heard of criticism of modern cultural developments that focuses on the horrible loss of allegorical ways of understanding. Chinese Communism could be seen as part of destroying culture that in many ways had rich allegorical functioning. Martin Luther's solo scriptura movement would be a great example of destructiveness within religious culture. In contrast there were the Quietists and Quakers who seem to have understood the uselessness of something like the Bible without an "inner light" or compassionate conscience and understanding. Madam Guyon wrote many books about the Bible and seems to have regarded everything in the Bible as allegorical. It seems she didn't see history or anything that literally happened on Earth as being recorded in the Bible. She seems tp have seem it as useful to look inside and interpret Bible stories as being things that happen inside us. For example Jesus, the disciples, the Jewish authorities, the Romans, all could be seen as parts of my personality. So I could use the stories as a way to work on myself and grow. Anyways, I can see how people could call Madam Guyon pretentious. It just cuts off thought, gives one permission to not consider other possibilities. I guess I don't like the word pretentious in a similar way to how I don't like hipster.
Anyways, thanks for creating interesting content!
And thank you for watching and taking the time to write up your thoughts in our comment section ❤️
Been watching a lot of your videos, here’s an engagement bump!
Thank you, and hope you keep enjoying our whacky stuff!
Great video!
You are great!
Smug Dancing is high art.
Oh yeah, totally. Without a doubt.
big thumbs up
You too!
Great!
Thanks for all the nice comments, friend
did you purposefully but the jonathan blow interview clip right after the yoshi's wooly world clip? it feels perfectly lined up. made me physically jump because i was literally thinking of the witness
Yes, all shots of our videos are carefully planned! :)
You did it? You did it!
She sure did it!
I wish the science was in as to whether Great Man History or Auteur Theory are maybe just essential for keeping up a shared historical/mythohistorical identity and worldview across the millennia. I mean, we just don't seem to have much widely recognized non-linear or smallpeople histories that go back further than a couple of centuries, so maybe to maintain old cultures we need pretentious ManPeople? Also you guys are remarkably great at doing non-pretentious videos on complicated topics, and without seeming out of your depths at that. Is it pretentious to make a new post here every time I come up with a new comment to this video?
Rly good
You are really good!
algorithm and love
Underrated video 🖒🖒🖒🖒
It is the most underrated video on this platform, we agree.
Love to see great videos made out of dumb TH-cam comments. Very enjoyable. 🥂
Cheers!
Kremel?
Yes.
You do a great job exploring the concept of pretentiousness, but I object to your ideas about the psychology of artists. It's very common that artists want their art to be seen as impressive or conceptually important, with an emphasis on "seen as." To this end, many artists create elaborate, high-concept justifications for works that are basically just pleas for attention.
The accusation of pretentiousness, whether rightly or wrongly, is meant to highlight the fakeness that is common in artistic criticism and in the discourse around it. It is my opinion that the gist of this critique is basically correct, even if the particulars of it are often wrong.
Of course specific accusations of pretentiousness can often be as flimsy as you suggest they are, but behind this is the reality that art communities tend to attract insecure people who use artistic expression primarily as a vehicle for self-promotion, while hiding behind the pretense of high concepts.
[citation needed]
@@granite_planet I wish I could present convincing evidence in a TH-cam comment, but I cannot. For this reason, you should take my opinion with a grain of salt, as you would with any other commenter.
For what it's worth, I'm a musician (not professional, but an experienced hobbyist) and I have decades of anecdotal evidence through my work with other musicians leading me to the above opinions. This is on top of my experiences as a consumer of art, and social proximity to many flavors or artists. I come from a family of musicians, hung out with a lot of artsy types in college, etc.
And though this too is not proof, I can appeal to something I think almost all of us share: the knowledge that there are indeed a lot of insecure people out there, and that art is an effective and socially accepted way for them to seek validation.
@@CricketStyleJ I'm also a musician, went through music college and all. But it's not my profession either. Your idea that art attracts insecure people trying to whip up something fake that seems important just doesn't resonate with my experience at all. I can't think of any example from my circles where someone was trying to appear artificially deep or high-concepty without having the matching artistic substance. And I don't know artists that have spent a lifetime learning their craft and ended up just producing "pleas of attention", lol.
I have a hard time imagining it's much different in visual arts. Your average artist doesn't usually exactly swim in reverence and validation - on the contrary, putting your work out in the world opens you up to every kind of criticism people may throw at you. It's not effective for seeking validation, and more often than not the public slams down any piece of art that they think tries incorporating a message as "pretentious".
You're right that artists want their work to be seen as important - obviously - but I find it beyond belief that there's an epidemic of people producing a facade of art that doesn't "deserve" the importance that's attached to it. And I find it disappointing that you seem to think you're fit to be the judge of which piece of art "deserves" the air of importance, and which is "fake" and doesn't.
There's the matter of media and advertisers blowing people and products out of proportion, but that hasn't got a lot to do with pretentiousness, more with good ole commercialism.
@@granite_planet I think our disagreement is occurring on a few different levels here. First, your experience with art is yours, and mine is mine, and they are different. Ok, fine. Not much else to say about that.
Next is that I have a more cynical take on the motives at play here. And yeah, I do. That's part of my personality and my outlook on humanity in general, not just about artists. I do see a great deal of human behavior as performative. It doesn't mean that anyone's art is "fake" though. I'll refer you back to my previously expressed opinion that the fakeness occurs primarily within the discourse around art, not the art itself.
I'm not even sure what it would mean for art to be fake, when it's well understood that all art is performative on some level. Even something like lip syncing on stage is still a real performance, despite the deception that it might sometimes entail.
And then there are some disagreements that seem to be just misunderstandings or misattributions. For instance, you ascribe to me the opinion that I see myself as an arbiter of who deserves recognition and who doesn't, when I haven't said any such thing. I don't think you are deliberately misrepresenting me here. My guess is that you made what seemed to you like a logical extrapolation from what you read. That's an understandable mistake, but it's still a mistake. I don't actually believe in the concept of "deserving" at all, and haven't made any attempt to assign it to anyone here.
And am I "fit to be the judge" of someone else's art? Yes, I am, and so are you, and so is everyone who encounters it. You describe my position as though I hold myself in some unique regard, but I simply don't. I can only guess that this is another extrapolation gone wrong.
Anyway, I do see some irony here in that you're so unwilling to recognize cynical motives in artists, yet so willing to attribute them to me. Meh. It's what people do when they encounter disagreements, I guess. Double standards all the way down.
@@CricketStyleJ You said that artists create elaborate justifications for their art when the art doesn't have that kind of significance in itself. It's not a stretch to reword that as being "fake", as in pretending to be something you're not.
The word "pretentious" does contain a value judgement. By labeling something such, you claim that the actual work doesn't justify the high concepts the artist associated to it. In other words, the art doesn't _deserve_ the status. Again, I don't think this is extrapolation.
Since we're getting stuck on what words exactly we said, I never claimed that you're judging who deserves recognition. I said you're judging whether some work is pretentious or not. And I never said you'd hold yourself uniquely privileged in that regard, either. Talk about misrepresenting :)
Finally, it's not fair to accuse me of misattributing cynical motives to you, when your original post is so obviously cynical. Also I don't have an issue with you being cynical, I have an issue with you making unreasonable generalizations.
i mean, it dosent help that your/or people perceived as pretencuis/ narratives at time are sardonic and describing your/there depreciative opinions or constructive criticism, with passive aggressiveness increases that pedantic pretencuis perception. (evidenced by the very funny but completely passive agressive JK Rolling vid).Assertive comunication is a skill creators might want to polish as to avoid the negative stigma. Still who cares people suck we interact with others for our self gratification so....lets all be pretencuis.