Notes on Camp

“The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”

After reading Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag, in my opinion an intellectual snob who hid her insecurities by embracing a chic, amoral postmodern aesthetic sensibility in vogue among fashionable sixties bohemian circles and is most famous for abstruse essays on photography, fashion, popular culture, and illness, I have attempted to understand her much-debated “Notes on Camp,” which first appeared in the left-leaning periodical “Partisan Review.” As J. Bryan Lowder asserted in “Postcards from Camp,” “Her intoxicating brew of detached authority, stylistic showmanship, intimidating intellectual name-dropping, and mysterious subject matter ensured that Sontag would corner the market on camp.”

The connoisseur of camp, Sontag believed, finds pleasure “in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the art of the masses.” For Sontag camp was something frivolous that was appealing ironically. She wrote: “Camp turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. It doesn’t argue that good is bad, or that bad is good. What it does is to offer for art a different – a supplementary – set of standards. It’s essential point is to dethrone the serious.” A good example is the 1972 John Waters film "Pink Flamingos," part of his "Trashy Trilogy," starring drag queen Divine. Pure camp is unintentionally artless, while something campy, such as the “Batman TV series of the 1960s, is purposely, absurdly exaggerated to get laughs or produce shock.

In 2019 New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art had an exhibition titled “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” which displayed outfits by such renown houses as Gucci and Dior. As Sontag once wrote, “Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of a million feathers.” Lady Gaga, to many the embodiment of camp, appeared at an awards show, appropriately, in a meat dress. Pop artist Andy Warhol, whom Sontag admired and posed for but later claimed to despise, brought a camp sensibility to his portraits of the banal (Campbell soup cans) and the beautiful (Marilyn Monroe). Sontag biographer Benjamin Roser believed that while Ronald Reagan was a reinvigorated conservatism’s rebuff to the debauched sixties, he was also a product of his age for whom image was interchangeable with action. Some have said the same thing about Trump, Reagan’s evil doppelganger. Roser wrote:

In some ways, Reagan represented the triumph of Andy Warhol: famously unable to distinguish between image and reality, metaphor and object, experience filmed and experience lived. Reagan told, with apparent conviction, a story about his father “ lying on the doorstep in a drunken stupor” that turned out to be lifted from a novel; he claimed that during World War II he had filmed Nazi death camps for the Signal Corps whereas he had spent the entire war in Culver City, making training films for Hal Roach studio. The living exemplar of Warholian celebrity was a former middling actor whose sensibilities derived from Hollywood, and in whom a sense of irony was never detected: unable to distinguish between an atrocity and a photograph of an atrocity. His presidency was defined by this notion of politics as role-playing, as camp.