Why You Should Be More Pretentious

Source: Why You Should Be More Pretentious, Horses, 11:20, uploaded 2023-05-05, category Education, Watch Later position 1096.

Horses begins with a word that people use as if its meaning were obvious. “Pretentious” sits beside “snobby”, “artsy”, “snooty”, and “arrogant”, yet it rarely carries a clear working definition. The video argues that the word does more harm than the behaviour it describes because it can police taste, discourage creative effort, and hide a person’s own fear of reaching beyond what they already understand.

A word without a working definition

Horses’s first definition is plain: a person or thing is pretentious when it attempts to be something that it often is not. Fine dining receives the label when a chef treats a meal as something beyond food. A film receives it when its director or audience treats the work as something beyond a film. The definition leaves room for a serious ambition to be dismissed as affectation.

The charge appears mild because it sounds like a judgement about style. Horses gives it a wider effect. Calling a person pretentious can divide people, discourage creative work, and turn the accuser towards pretension too. The word becomes a way to announce that another person has exceeded the limits of what they are allowed to enjoy or attempt.

The argument begins with authenticity. People often call someone pretentious when they believe that person only pretends to like something in order to impress others. That accusation assumes that the accuser can recognise a genuine interest from the outside. Horses treats that confidence with suspicion because everyone edits their personality for different audiences.

The word persona originally means a mask in Greek. A person speaks to a boss, a child, a parent, or a friend from a different part of their character. Horses makes the point through an intentionally ordinary example: someone may conceal a weekend drug habit from their grandmother whilst discussing it freely with friends. A romantic partner may know that the person hates work whilst the boss hears a different account. Daily life involves this adjustment, so authenticity supplies weak grounds for condemning someone else’s performance.

Taste, class, and the policing of authenticity

The question then becomes who has the authority to decide whether another person really likes something. Horses turns to 1980s New York, where hip-hop artists in basements and at block parties sampled Kraftwerk, a German band associated with conservatory training and electronic music. The example tests a narrow idea of cultural authenticity. The artists’ interest in Kraftwerk can be read as an inventive encounter across scenes, although a cynical observer can dismiss it as pretension.

Horses sees that cynical reading as a way of policing taste. People can like things that others neither like nor understand. Certain foods and films also carry associations with an elite class, which makes the label sharper when people from outside that class claim an interest in them. The charge tells people that their class status limits the culture they may enter.

In this sense, pretension keeps a person inside a prescribed set of interests. Someone who reaches beyond those interests can be pushed back towards them through ridicule. Horses calls the result harmful because the ambition to explore a new form or subject often needs time before it becomes legible to anyone else.

The word also produces a peculiar form of self-contempt. Calling another person’s enjoyment pretentious can mean that the person is too foolish to understand the thing. The accuser often admits, in the same act, that they do not understand it either. The charge then leaves both people in a worse position, since it ends the possibility of learning what the work or activity offers.

Horses describes a related form as “downward pretension”. Someone may prefer cheap beer to fine wine and treat that preference as proof of being grounded. Politicians use a similar performance when they remove their ties and roll up their sleeves to present themselves as members of the working class. The “prolier than thou” pose still performs an identity for an audience. Horses treats this as a particularly damaging kind of pretension because it turns apparent ordinariness into a political disguise.

Pretension as ambition

The video changes the meaning of the word. To be pretentious can mean aiming beyond one’s present state. That aim carries risk because a person may overreach, lack the needed skill, or fail in public. Horses still treats the attempt as a condition of progress.

The examples move through art and technology. A Spanish artist who questioned the limits of painting becomes, in the video’s telling, part of the route towards Pablo Picasso. A group of California hippies who imagined a greater role for the personal computer becomes part of the route towards the iPhone. The examples compress complex histories into illustrations, yet they make the intended point: ambitious work begins before its success can be known.

Horses does not expect every person to become Picasso or Steve Jobs. It argues that each person deserves the chance to try. If ambition is dismissed as pretension at the start, ideas can be rejected before anyone has tested them.

Failure belongs to the same process. A scientist or painter can exceed their ability, fail, and use that failure to move closer to something that works. Horses extends the claim across drama, painting, cinema, literature, science, engineering, and agriculture. It presents every development as the result of people failing repeatedly until they succeed. That is a broad claim rather than a demonstrated history, although the underlying relation is clear within the video’s argument: the possibility of failure gives experimentation its force.

The pejorative use of “pretentious” therefore carries an implicit rule. It tells people that failure would expose them, so they should avoid the attempt. Horses treats that rule as absurd because the failures remain part of the history of anything people now value.

Childhood curiosity and a world without pretense

Children provide the video with a simpler example. They try temporary interests whilst learning what they care about. Adults rarely call a child pretentious for exploring a new activity or medium. Horses treats adult curiosity as the same impulse after it has acquired more social risk.

People become curious about what a medium can do and where its limits lie. That curiosity can lead to new interests and new passions. Labelling the interest pretentious can therefore close down a person’s desire to learn before they have had time to form a judgement of their own.

Horses tests the idea through a thought experiment. A world without pretension might seem easy to understand and agreeable to everyone. The video instead imagines that nearly everything people regard as ordinary would disappear because ordinary things also began as attempts to exceed an existing form.

The examples become deliberately comic. Hollywood studio heads in the early 2000s push comic books into a connected film universe and create the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Adolphus Busch reimagines the American beer market in the nineteenth century, changes his business and product, and produces Budweiser. Further back, a Neanderthal leaves a cave and builds a house. Whether or not these examples support the historical weight Horses gives them, they show the scale of the claim. Familiar culture and familiar shelter both depend on someone deciding that the current form could change.

For Horses, pretension supplies the ambition that moves a society beyond its existing arrangements. A person who creates something new may look ridiculous before the result appears. The possibility of looking ridiculous remains part of the cost of making progress.

A more useful definition

The final section returns to the word as a social weapon. Calling something pretentious often ends a conversation because it lets a person dismiss a work instead of admitting that they lack the knowledge to understand it. Horses asks the viewer to examine that first reaction. A painting may be difficult because it requires context. A film may be reaching for a serious subject and fail through weak writing or poor direction. “Pretentious” gives neither case a useful account of what went wrong.

The video proposes a better question: what is the work pretending to be, if it is pretending at all? That question leaves room for criticism. A film can aim at complex subjects and fail to handle them. A dish can present itself as fine dining and offer little beyond the performance. Specific criticism can describe the gap between the ambition and the result, whilst the general insult closes it.

Horses settles on a definition that includes both achievement and failure. Pretentiousness appears when someone strives for greatness, sometimes with enough ability to succeed and sometimes without it. The failed attempt can invite mockery, yet reaching beyond one’s ability remains an admirable risk within the video’s account. Abandoning that risk would also abandon the desire for progress. Horses’s conclusion is simple: people should become a little more pretentious.

Limits

This note follows Horses’s argument and keeps its historical examples at the level at which the video presents them. The captions give no sources for the Kraftwerk example, the claims about Picasso, the personal computer and the iPhone, the history of Budweiser, or the account of Neanderthal housing. These examples work as illustrations of ambition inside the essay; they do not establish those histories on their own.

The video also treats pretension as a broad force behind nearly all progress. That framing leaves out forms of change that arise through maintenance, cooperation, necessity, or gradual adaptation. Its stronger claim remains useful as a defence of experimentation, although the word becomes more precise when it distinguishes a failed ambitious work from a performance that only seeks status.

Further reading / references

• Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, Coffee House Press, 2016. The video description links to this book as the source of many of its ideas.