Notes on ‘Camp’

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

Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.

Not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard –and the most articulate audience– of Camp.

It’s good because it’s awful

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility. It has hardened into an idea ...

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.

The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine…

I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it.

To talk about camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves.

In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying.

To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration.

It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” - Lady Windermere’s Fan

Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

10. 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.

A great work of art is never simply (or even mainly) a vehicle of ideas or of moral sentiments. It is, first of all, an object modifying our consciousness and sensibility, changing the composition, however, slightly, of the humus that nourishes all specific ideas and sentiments.

One must distinguish between naive and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is usually less satisfying.

And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp: Zuleika Dobson Tiffany lamps Scopitone films The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA The Enquirer, headlines and stories Aubrey Beardsley drawings Swan Lake Bellini's operas Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards Schoedsack's King Kong the Cuban pop singer La Lupe Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man the old Flash Gordon comics women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.) the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett stag movies seen without lust

30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artífice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric - something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.

Gaudi's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal — most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia — the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.

Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.