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There is perhaps no phrase that has been more detrimental to modern artistic and cultural discourse than “Let people enjoy things.”
“Let people enjoy things” as an idea is innocuous in and of itself. If someone is having fun, why ruin that for them? The beauty of art and culture is its diversity, and anyone who argues no one should enjoy anything but the things they enjoy is anti-intellectual in their own right.
However, this concept has taken on a life of its own in modern culture. Contemporary discourse has been boiled down to the innocent people who want to “enjoy things” and the self-important snob whose pretentious tastes ruin that. Social media posts satirizing these exchanges have grown increasingly popular over the years, pitting a normal person against a rude, ostentatious know-it-all who spits out obscure references and scoffs at their interlocutor’s vanilla tastes.
These posts, while often funny for those of us who have had the displeasure of interacting with a know-it-all like this before, are a bastardization of pretentiousness’ true nature and clearly show how the advent of Gen Z’s “Cringe Culture” has created an aversion to sincerity.
If someone or something is pretentious, they are attempting to display a greater sense of cultural importance than they actually possess. As philosophy professor Iskra Fileva described in her 2021 article “How People Become Pretentious,” pretentiousness is a performance of the social self. It is precisely not the quality of liking obscure, sophisticated aspects of culture or criticizing popular aspects — it is performatively enjoying or critiquing these things.
This is the key misunderstanding that has ruined so much of modern artistic dialogue. Earnestly liking a piece of art, digging into its meaning and discovering an interpretation for that art is not pretentious. Similarly, sincerely caring about a medium and critiquing pieces of it that you find to be uninteresting, poorly executed or surface level is not pretentious.
This brings us back to “letting people enjoy things.”
I love music. It’s far more common to see me wearing a large pair of noise-canceling Sony headphones connected to a retro MP3 player than not. I listen to genre nearly indiscriminately — you’re equally likely to find me listening to SOPHIE’s hyperpop as Ornette Coleman’s free jazz. On the other hand, I do not care for Taylor Swift’s music in the slightest. Her music is — in my opinion — soulless, vapid and overwhelmingly devoid of substance.
Following contemporary connotations, I am extremely pretentious; I am that self-important snob whose pretentious tastes ruin the enjoyment of Taylor Swift fans. Am I a self-important snob? Maybe — not for me to say. Am I pretentious, however? Absolutely not.
There is no percentage of my tastes that is a performance. I don’t listen to — what’s typically branded as — eclectic music to impress anyone. Similarly, I don’t dislike mainstream music like Taylor Swift to portray a social identity, I dislike it because I earnestly love the medium and I dislike music that doesn’t stack up to the work I love. Earnest enjoyment does not equal pretentiousness; in fact, they are antithetical.
This does not mean that many people who are often labelled pretentious are not snobbish, rude and performative. Anyone who’s been in an English class with a man who wants to show everyone else he knows more than them because he read “Infinite Jest” knows these types of people are abundant. These performances are often rooted in narcissism, and it is immensely clear to any onlookers that these rude snobby types do not sincerely care for the mediums in which their pretension lies. The problem with these types isn’t what they claim to like; it is their selfish, rude and oftentimes misogynistic social performance.
This is where the modern definition of pretentiousness — and its relation to the “just let people enjoy things” mentality — become harmful. Conflating earnest love and critiques with supercilious performance obfuscates how pretentiousness actually manifests in daily life. If a film buff who loves foreign films and has sincere critiques of “Barbie” is given the exact same description as a man who belittles and scoffs at people who enjoyed “Barbie” because he watched “The Color of Pomegranates,” how can the concept of pretentiousness be treated with any seriousness? How can something used so lightly be given any credence as a legitimate criticism?
Pretentiousness is a real issue, and it should be treated as such. However, earnest love and enjoyment is just as real, and the sooner we reembrace sincerity as a society, the better.
Reach Willow Engle at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
