"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."
