by The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as Showily or pretentiously artistic: ARTY, ARTSY
My dad’s not really in touch with my art, but he’s also a total country boy who married an artsy-fartsy, Ms. Frizzle-type woman. —Ryan Dombal
Your Twitter and Facebook feed are probably bombarded with artsy fartsy shots of food and architecture, snapped by your friends that don’t exactly have a BFA, and sometimes it’s just annoying. —Leslie Horn
Anu Garg in A Word a Day defines it as an adjective: Pretentiously artistic or sophisticated. He continues by explaining the etymology as: From reduplication of art, from Latin ars (art), as fart + pejorative diminutive suffix -sy. The word fart is from Old English feortan, ultimately from the Indo-European root perd- (to fart), which also gave us partridge and futz.
While I agree with Artsy-Fartsy being originally a pejorative adjective, its meaning has slightly shifted. After looking at the IMDB list of “Artsy-Fartsy films”, I realized they mainly seemed odd films with tones of artistic cinema. However, if all cinema is art, the new artistic and poetic films are being categorized as Artsy-Fartsy to differentiate them from conventional and commercial films.
Movies IMDB considers as Artsy-Fartsy: Requiem for a Dream (2000), Alice (1988), Pi (1998), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Her (2013), Black Swan (2010), Amélie (2001).
IMDB’s Adventure/Creative Artsy-Fartsy Films: Into the Wild (2007), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Pulp Fiction (1994), Moonrise Kingdom (2014), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Kill Bill (2003).
As you can see, none of those films are pretentious or lacking in substance but are still considered Artsy-Fartsy. Therefore, I’d like to define Artsy-Fartsy as, unconventional, usually odd, and quirky films. If you’re into that, you can explore life’s strangeness through them. Sometimes we live monotonous lives because we are focused on work and family, and we repeat the same routine for decades. That distorts our perception of reality taking away the quality of how odd the world actually is and how different people are from one another.
We try to become a specific type of person to adapt to society by forgetting our own tastes and what we want. Hence these movies seem weirder than daily life, but are they weirder than life? Just decades ago, lobotomies were still legal and practiced, patients were told to sing, and doctors would cut their brains until they stopped singing. What is normal about that? Or the fact that doctors would smoke cigarettes and even appear in commercials smoking. Or, for example, I had a dog that turned out to be a hermaphrodite. We picked her up from the streets, named her “Uma”, and took care of her thinking she was a girl. As she kept growing some weird things happened in her body, she had a pink thing sticking out of her vagina and the first vet we saw said she had an enormous clitoris, claiming it was a genetic mutation but nothing dangerous. Then she kept growing and became very muscular, hyperactive, and would hump my other dog and people. Eventually, like most dogs, we took her to get spayed. A few hours later the vet called saying they found a uterus, but no ovaries, instead they found testicles. Turns out, the giant clitoris was almost a penis. In the end, they only removed the testicles. Now, if I made a movie about this:
1. It would be considered weird, disturbing almost.
2. People (especially conservatives) would surely catalog that as “pretentious” maybe even dare to say I’m trying to portray a genderless narrative on film. But would it truly be pretentious if it’s something real?
Another example is people claiming “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is pretentious. There isn’t a procedure by which you can erase the memories about someone. If there was, people would be trying to forget more than their exes, maybe even their parents. The reality is people are already doing that with drugs. That’s the whole point of substance consumption, trying to go numb and forget.
Is Arts-Fartsy Inherently Pretentious?
I think no art piece can be considered “pretentious”. All art attempts to convey a message—whether successful or not depends on its execution. A common critique of “Artsy-Fartsy” art or films is that they appear self-important or overly ambitious.
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful Truths by Alejandro Iñarritu (The Revenant, Birdman) was categorized as “pretentious”, and he responded: “If I were from Denmark or Sweden, I might be seen as philosophical, but when you’re Mexican and you say things, you’re pretentious.” Which, I believe to be true. I can understand judging any film as “too ambitious”, “lacking substance”, and “insufficient arguments to back the main premise of the film”. But, to call it pretentious is pretentious itself.
If you tell me, you didn’t like a movie because it was pretentious, you didn’t say anything at all. Tell me what was wrong, what was a mistake and why, and what felt superficial. I can understand a person behaving pretentiously by the things they say, their behaviors, and who they try to surround themselves with -especially the kinds of behaviors that seem impulsive-. But if a film, especially a three-hour film is made, there is -clearly- a premeditated script and message. If it fails to explain its position in detail or starts with an interesting point of view, but the approach eventually fails and loses strength, that is completely different than appearing as self-important.
In my opinion, Bardo had some successes and some failures. One of the things that work is starting with the premise of Mexican “Malinchismo” and its commentary about the Eurocentric vision of putting anything Western on a pedestal without understanding why it’s better than anything local. He also succeeds at opening his speech surrounding Mexican scholars’ hypocrisy regarding how much they praise Mexico while abroad but end up looking down on their own culture while they’re at home. However, the speech falls apart in the middle of the movie. Instead of “pretentious” -because it is also self-criticism- I think it’s cynical.
His film is the definition of “no filter” when it comes to portraying social issues and pretty much, openly judging other Mexicans in the media. Maybe they are the ones who got offended and quickly qualified the film as “pretentious”, we’d have to look at who is criticizing the film as such. However, the speech quickly turns into a “pre-mortem” dilemma surrounding legacy. I think it’s cynical to explicitly comment about inequality in Mexican society, go back in time, and write a scene about the main character talking with Hernan Cortes sitting on a pile of corpses, to then ignore and disregard that and make the film about your life and legacy. In other words, rather than pretentious, it is shameless to start commenting on Mexico’s Social Structure and finish talking about yourself. Either way, whatever rights or wrongs the film may have, I think it’s an example of this new category we call “Artsy-Fartsy”- artistic cinema with out-of-the-ordinary scenes, visuals, and bold opinions, regardless of the truth to them.
“Artsy-fartsy” is a subjective label shaped by individual taste. It often reflects our learned preferences and biases. Whether you consider these films pretentious or groundbreaking, they undeniably push boundaries, encouraging conversations about art, culture, and identity.
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