Were They Pretentious?

An introduction to a new series!

What is “Were They Pretentious?”

Before we started Art is Easy we ran a website called poetryispretentious.com. The ethos of our work revolved around one unsurprising core tenet. Poetry is, in many of its current iterations, indeed, pretentious.

We wanted to combat that. We made writing prompts that were super accessible, lending themselves to ease of completion with the goal of encouraging new writers to give poetry a fair shake.

As an offshoot of these efforts we started making videos on our social media pages called “Were They Pretentious?” in which Sam and I would pass judgment upon famous artists to decide whether or not they were deserving of the coveted title, “Pretentious Artist”.

This was the most fun project we did together. Just the two of us making up arbitrary metrics passing arbitrary judgment to figure out arbitrary results. Soon, people started leaving comments, chiming in with their own takes on what we were discussing.

And so, in an effort to collaborate with you, we’ve decided to revitalize the series. We talked a lot here about how Art is Easy, but Art is also Fun. We’re not making anything profound, we’re not authorities on any subject at all. But we can have fun, and we hope you’ll have fun following along, too.

What to Expect

So, what does this series entail? Every week we will decide on a new writer or artist to put on trial. One of us will rapid fire facts about them and the other will determine Pretentious or Not Pretentious. And finally, we will decide, using a scale of 1-10 (1 being not pretentious and 10 being unbelievably pretentious) where that artists lands in the pantheon of pretentious artists.

We want to hear from you! If you disagree with our takes, let us know! If there are artists you want us to cover, let us know that, too. We have so much fun making these, and we want you to have so much fun right alongside with us.

We hope to record our live reactions to the facts, and hopefully we’ll be able to upload that along with these articles.

E.B. White is up first! Stay tuned, and thank you for reading.