It's Good Because It's Bad: Notes on "Notes on 'Camp'"

"Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it," quips Oscar Wilde in Vera, or The Nihilists, to whom Susan Sontag dedicates her "Notes on 'Camp'" -- first published in the Partisan Review in 1964 and then collected in Against Interpretation two years later. For Sontag, Wilde is a "transitional figure" in the history of Camp, which she discusses through a series of numbered "jottings" not unlike Guy Debord's notoriously opaque treatises of "Le société du spectacle," which I'm sure you've read. Sontag's Notes are exceedingly clever, insightful, thorough, and quotable; they bring to light the difficulties and paradoxes surrounding Camp without resorting to frightful jargon. In a moment I'll list a few more of my favorite excerpts, but while the subject is still Wilde I'd like to quote Sontag's #46. (Note: When she writes "dandy," she is certainly thinking of Uncle Oscar as the epitome of that type.)

46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (...) He was dedicated to "good 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. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp--Dandyism in the age of mass culture--makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

I concur with Sontag's contextualizing of "good taste" by way of consigning it to a not-too-distant past, implying that to speak of such a thing nowadays (still true in 2011 as it was in 1964) is either anachronism or Camp itself. In my view, the pretensions of the wealthy and/or intellectual elite no longer qualify as "taste" as perhaps they once did before the turn-of-the-20th-century; it is usually quite boring to learn that someone has bought or argued their way into an apparently refined style -- even more so that they were born into it. And, as Sontag points out in #46 and elsewhere, the blindfolds worn toward the enjoyableness of mass-produced items represent handcrafted tedium more so than any salvageable definition of "taste."

Sontag's "Notes" provide a good reference for formulating a discussion about taste and Camp, but never read them too closely or seriously. As a subject, Camp is much too important for that.

• The Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized--or at least apolitical. (#2)
• Camp is a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons.... True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It's not all in the eye of the beholder. (#3)
• There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Camp." Or "too important," not marginal enough. (#6)
• Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style--but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. (#8)
• Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." (#10)
• 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. (#18)
• A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. (#27)
• Things are campy not when they become old--but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. (#31)
• Camp and tragedy are antitheses. (#39)
• One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity" is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness. (#42)
• While it's not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a peculiar affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard--and the most articulate audience--of Camp. (#51)
• Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation--not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless cynicism but a sweet cynicism.) (#55)
• Camp is a tender feeling. (Here, one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which--when it is not Camp--embodies an attitude that is related, but still very different. Pop Art is more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.) (#56)
• The ultimate Camp statement: It's good because it's awful. ... Of course, one can't always say that. (#58)

Quotations are from Sontag, Susan. "Notes on 'Camp.'" Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 1966. 275-292.