Camp Aesthetics and Failed Seriousness!

Definition of ‘Camp’ by Susan Sontag

[A Glossary of Literary and Cultural Theory, By Peter Brooker]

According to Susan Sontag, Camp is a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content.

Camp aesthetics disrupt many of modernism's notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption.

In her essay 'Notes on Camp' (1966), the critic Susan Sontag identified camp as 'the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience'.

This she distinguished from the 'seriousness' and intensity respectively of 'high culture' and 'Avant-Garde art'.

Camp has been chiefly associated with an exaggerated style, with Parody and self-dramatization, and Sontag's terms are clearly applicable to this.

'Notes on Camp' and other essays in the collection in which it appeared, Against Interpretation (1966), was part of Sontag's polemic against the liberal humanist defence of modernism and an associated hierarchy of high, middle-brow and Mass art on the part of a contemporary generation of New York Intellectuals.

Sontag associated camp with a 'new non-literary culture' of music, dance, films and architecture whose creativity needed to be recognized in a new critical vocabulary.

To Sontag,

Camp must be “passionate,” be the result of an “uncontrolled sensibility,” be an attempt to “do something extraordinary.”

 Camp “incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.” “Camp and tragedy are antitheses.”

“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’

One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

“Camp proposes a comic vision of the world,” but it’s an “experience of under-involvement, of detachment.”

Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman."

To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of "man" and "woman," "person" and "thing.") But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.

“Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste . . . The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating.

“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature.” “People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as ‘a camp,’ they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.”

“The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful.”