pretention/ taste arbitration

The weird thing about the word "arbitrary" is its relation to arbiter/arbitration--that is, to decision making. So that "arbitrary" actually means "subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion". Might one then say that "discretionary spending" is "arbitrary spending"? (discretionary: "regulated by one's own judgment). And then you get into the quagmire of defining spending which is discrete but not discreet, etc.

I digress.

In matters of taste, arbitration can seem arbitrary: why this trend and not another? And although in this short blog I am unable to go into matters such as snobbishness, class-determinations, a history of high and low culture, the hegemony of the bourgeois, the curious (demographically aproportional) ascendency of Jews and gays in determinations of culture (at least in New York), hipsterism, the legacy of the 1960s, and other factors that arbitrate what is cool, please consider these the background and future topics of this blog: to remove the "arbitrary" from arbitration of taste, to "expose it for what it is."

The other day in my Scholarly Writing seminar, we read James English's "Economy of Prestige". I also spilled teriyaki sauce all over the copy I was borrowing, and had to drack down the last hardcover copy in New York City so that the person who loaned it to me would not think I was the world's biggest jerk. In the class discussion, I thought my smartest comment was that, as in Borges' "The Lottery of Babylon," the lottery stops being a system of monetary prizes with clear winners, and becomes an extremely obscure, universal system resistant to ideas of winning/losing or even of an obvious outcome, until the lottery becomes indistinguishable from LIFE, so I thought that the system of prizes in English's narrative has become essentially synonymous with culture. There is no "outside".

However, something like the Criterion Collection has a prestige that is not about prizes, so I dunno... that probably also should be investigated later.

My point for today is this: the word "pretentious" should be used correctly. There is a great moment in Zizek's "Looking Awry" where he calls A River Runs Through it "pretentious". This is the precise meaning of the word. Of course, this example is doubly ironic. One, to cite a prominent philosopher to define the word "pretentious"--- secondly, that this philosopher's "slumming it" by discussing this garbage film is in its own way pretentious.

Nonetheless, I think we may use A River Runs Through it as our definition of pretension, and from there go on to discuss taste. What A River Runs Through it, or, to switch our examples, Schindler's List demonstrates, is a certain paranoia of being unable to distinguish between the "actually good" and the merely "pretentious" (that is, a paranoia which would have saved the Oscar from going to Forrest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction).

Ironically (in the sense that here taste is not discretionary but overheard--and thus arbitrary in an entirely different way), many seem to think that the only way to avoid falling into a trap of "bad taste" is to have an exaggeratedly refined set of "good taste" which ends up being altogether predictable and pretentious.

To simplify:
1) Schindler's List is a wildly successful film by an acclaimed director, about a serious subject, featuring several great performances, based on a literary novel, of an appropriately epic length, a winner of numerous awards and accolades, etc.
2) At the same time, I would be completely shocked to hear anyone (in 2006) cite Schindler's List as being anywhere near a great film, on their list of great films, a film by a great director, of anything approaching artistic relevance, or even a second look, etc.
3) In order to be cool, to have good taste in movies, one must not like Schindler's List. But, this demands a certain paranoia-- should one not like any films similar to Schindler's List? is all of Spielberg off limit? all holocaust movies? all Hollywood movies? all American movies? all 90s movies?
4) If one closed out all spielberg/hollywood/American/90s films, you would certainly weed out a lot of garbage. On the other hand, you would weed out some good stuff.
5) That "good stuff" on the other hand, probably is more popular and therefore susceptible to 'contamination' by uncool teenagers, as in the case of Rushmore, Reservoir Dogs...
6) The easy, paranoid solution, then, is to simply stick to the pretentious-- foreign, canonized, or experimental films which will never have the whiff of popularism or uncoolness. At worst, they will be slight and irrelevant. One risks nothing.

I find this to be absolutely unacceptable. Take the superior movie "Reds." Nearly all the same things (as in #1) could be said about Reds as about Schindler's List, and while Reds is probably going to have a comeback with its recent DVD release, I can imagine a good number of snobs having to wait another 10 or 20 years to realize how great this movie is, until it takes its place among (deservedly canonized) movies like "Dog Day Afternoon", "The French Connection," "Bonnie and Clyde," etc.

The point here is that being PRETENTIOUS (in avoidance of the obviously pretentious hollywood dreck and anything paranoiacally associated with it) means, not that you are avoiding all criticism ("at least i didn't accidentally like schindler's list"), but that you are infantilizing your taste, and are exposed to the critique (by me, at least) that there is actually no taste to be discerned in such an obviously defensive move.

You may also take the above as an indictment of hipsterism. Rather than being cutting-edge, in the negative sense hipsterism is a cowardly retreat behind unassailable categories of elitism, the avant garde, the imported, the sheltered. It waits around for something to be deemed "safe" (latest: doom metal, which would have been the least cool thing in the world ten years ago) while always repeating the same mistake (as with "Reds", which is totally under the radar).

This, you will notice, is the opposite of cutting-edge. It would be better termed as "waiting around". And, as an effort to esablish oneself as having "good taste", it accomplishes quite the reverse: the plainly pretentious exposes itself as having no taste at all.