Susan Sontag’s 1964 landmark essay "Notes on 'Camp'" defined "camp" as a unique aesthetic sensibility that values artifice, exaggeration, and theatricality over traditional notions of good taste or moral seriousness.
Core Ideas of the Essay
- Style Over Content: Camp treats life and art as a question of style, turning away from deep moral meaning or serious political ideology.
- The Triumph of Artifice: Sontag argued that nothing in nature can truly be camp. Camp requires human intervention, exaggeration, theatricality, and a love for the unnatural.
- Life as Theater: Camp views everything in quotation marks—it sees a person not just as a person, but as playing a role, or an object as a performance.
- Blurring High and Low:
The essay helped break down rigid barriers between high art and popular culture by showing how serious art and low-brow kitsch can share the same extravagant spirit.
Sontag's essay listed 58 numbered notes, featuring diverse examples of what she considered the camp sensibility:
- Objects & Decor: Tiffany lamps, artificial nature like the gardens of Versailles, and old picture postcards.
- Film & Media: The 1933 film King Kong, old Flash Gordon comics, and stag movies viewed without lust.
Before Sontag's text, camp largely existed as an unarticulated, private code of signification within queer communities. By naming and analyzing it, Sontag brought the concept into mainstream cultural criticism, forever changing how society views irony, fashion, and pop culture.
Synopsis. In note no. 4, Sontag offers a representative list of items she considers "camp": Zuleika Dobson. Tiffany lamps. Scopito...
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Notes on 'Camp' * Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on 'Camp'" defines camp as an aesthetic sensibility that values extravagance, irony,
Defining camp: Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" Camp is an aesthetic, a style, an attitude, a sensibility. Camp is about performance, ex...