Hal Duncan on Pretentiousness

This is a great post that I won't even try to summarize. Here's a short excerpt, though. (And the post that got it all started.)And in terms of motivation (a), where such a spurious assumption is made, why should we not turn it around and question the antagonistic purposes of the questioner, whether the accusation is driven by objective evaluation or subjective prejudice? From an opposing perspective any accusation of pretentiousness can be seen as an entirely baseless slur on a writer, and one which seeks to turn the level of artistic ambition of a work into a marker of its inverse -- a lack of artistic ambition. When an allegation treats the very ambitiousness of the work itself as evidence not of a writer's ambition for that work but rather as evidence of their personal ambitions -- their shallow desire for attention -- that allegation can be disregarded as conspiracy theory rather than valid critique.