The best description I've seen of what it feels like to make art
So if it's artists being referred to as pretentious, then... yeah. Artists do regularly attempt to impress by affecting greater importance, talent and culture than is actually possessed.
In fact, it's the leap you pretty much have to take to create anything. It's your foolish hope that you might go from not knowing how to do something to doing something, and then eventually doing it well enough that you might want to share it with other people.
The creative process as I've witnessed it is generally plagued by frustration, insecurity, and doubt, alternated by brief moments of pleasure in having made something you think is halfway decent, followed by having to summon ludicrous amounts of confidence in order to have to share that thing with other people, and concluding with night sweats as you wonder immediately after -- and then forever after -- whether you are a fraud and your work is terrible no matter how many people say they like it.
Hearing this is so validating I don't even know how to express it.
"Art is Pretentious* | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios" [9:25]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LNiJK3rK9s
Despite the number of hours I've put in over the last couple of years it still feels incredibly pretentious to call myself an artist.
And yet, I want to embrace that label.
I think about how the term of address for people performing at open mics and poetry slams is "poet". You do the thing, you are the thing.
