About the Work
“Notes on Camp” is a 1964 essay by Susan Sontag that attempts to define and explore a particular modern sensibility—one that she calls “Camp.” Written in the form of fifty-eight numbered notes or jottings rather than a continuous prose argument, the essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde and carries an epigraph drawn from his work: “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” Sontag acknowledges at the outset that Camp is an esoteric phenomenon, a private code and badge of identity among small urban cliques, and that it has rarely been discussed in print. She cites only one prior treatment: a sketch in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954). The essay is thus an early attempt to name and analyze something that had circulated in sophisticated circles but had not yet received sustained critical attention.
“To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”
Sontag is candid about the paradox of her undertaking. To talk about Camp, she writes, is to betray it; yet she defends this betrayal on the grounds of edification and because she wishes to resolve a conflict in her own sensibility—she is strongly drawn to Camp yet also offended by it. She argues that one who wholly shares a sensibility cannot analyze it but can only exhibit it; naming a sensibility requires deep sympathy modified by revulsion. This tension runs throughout the essay, giving it a distinctive tone of engagement and critical distance. The form of the notes themselves is deliberate: Sontag chooses jottings over a linear essay because she fears that a solemn treatise would produce inferior Camp. The fragmentary, aphoristic structure mirrors the sensibility it describes.
Context
The essay emerges from the intellectual and cultural milieu of early 1960s America, a period of intense aesthetic experimentation and debate about the boundaries between high and low culture. Sontag writes as a critic deeply immersed in the arts—film, opera, ballet, literature, painting—and her references range from classical antiquity to contemporary popular culture. The essay reflects a moment when the old certainties of modernist high culture were being questioned, and when new forms of cultural appreciation, often drawing on mass entertainment and kitsch, were gaining intellectual legitimacy.
Sontag situates Camp within a broader history of taste and sensibility. She notes that the sensibility of an era is decisive but perishable, citing rare historical studies such as Huizinga on the late Middle Ages and Febvre on sixteenth-century France as models of how one might capture a fugitive sensibility. Her own essay is an attempt to do for the modern period what those historians did for earlier ones. She also places Camp in relation to the dandyism of the nineteenth century, arguing that Camp is the modern form of dandyism—a way of being an aristocrat of taste in an age of mass culture. The essay thus participates in ongoing debates about aestheticism, the role of the artist, and the meaning of style that had preoccupied European intellectuals since the nineteenth century.
Structure of the Book
The essay is composed of fifty-eight numbered notes, each a compact observation or argument about some aspect of Camp. This structure is not arbitrary; Sontag explicitly rejects the linear essay form as inadequate to her subject. Camp, she suggests, is a sensibility that resists systematic exposition. To cram it into a system would be to harden it into an idea and lose what is essential about it. The notes therefore proceed by accumulation and juxtaposition rather than by logical deduction. Each note stands somewhat alone, yet together they build a coherent portrait of the sensibility.
The notes move through a series of related concerns. Early notes define Camp in general terms—as a mode of aestheticism, a love of artifice and exaggeration, a way of seeing the world in quotation marks. Subsequent notes offer examples of Camp in art and persons, distinguish between naive and deliberate Camp, and explore the relationship between Camp and seriousness. Later notes broaden the discussion to consider Camp’s place among the creative sensibilities, its relationship to tragedy and comedy, and its historical antecedents in dandyism. The final notes reflect on what Camp means for the modern condition—how it answers the problem of being a dandy in an age of mass culture, and how it offers a new standard of artifice and theatricality.
Inside the Book
The essay opens with a meditation on the unnamed and undescribed. Many things, Sontag observes, lack names, including the modern sensibility known as Camp. This sensibility is a variant of sophistication, distinct from it, and is characterized by a love of the unnatural, of artifice, and of exaggeration. Camp is esoteric, a private code and badge of identity among small urban cliques. Sontag notes that it has rarely been discussed in print, aside from Isherwood’s sketch. She then makes her confession: to talk about Camp is to betray it, but she will do so for edification and to resolve a conflict in her own sensibility. She is strongly drawn to Camp yet offended by it. One who wholly shares a sensibility cannot analyze it, only exhibit it; naming a sensibility requires deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
Sontag then develops a theory of taste. Taste, she argues, governs every free human response—in people, visual matters, emotion, acts, morality, and intelligence. Taste has no system or proofs, but there is a logic of taste rooted in a consistent sensibility. A sensibility is almost ineffable; if crammed into a system, it hardens into an idea. The sensibility of an era is decisive but perishable. She cites Huizinga on the late Middle Ages and Febvre on sixteenth-century France as rare historical studies of sensibility. She chooses jottings over a linear essay to capture this fugitive quality, fearing that a solemn treatise would produce inferior Camp.
The numbered notes begin with a series of definitions and examples. Note 1 states that Camp is a mode of aestheticism, seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon in terms of artifice and stylization, not beauty. Note 2 observes that emphasizing style slights content; Camp is disengaged, depoliticized, or apolitical. Note 3 distinguishes Camp as both a way of seeing and a quality in objects and persons—campy movies, clothes, furniture, people—and insists that not everything can be seen as Camp; it is not all in the eye of the beholder. Note 4 offers a canon of Camp examples: Zuleika Dobson, Tiffany lamps, Scopitone films, the Brown Derby restaurant, The Enquirer, Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Swan Lake, Bellini’s operas, Visconti’s direction of Salome and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, turn-of-the-century postcards, Schoedsack’s King Kong, singer La Lupe, Lynn Ward’s God’s Man, old Flash Gordon comics, 1920s women’s clothes, the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and stag movies seen without lust.
Note 5 observes that Camp favors decorative art emphasizing texture and style over content. Concert music is rarely Camp; classical ballet, opera, and movies have long been saturated with it. Popular music, particularly yé yé, has recently been annexed to Camp, and movie criticism popularizes it. Note 6 introduces the idea that some works are “too good to be Camp.” Cocteau is Camp but not Gide; Richard Strauss but not Wagner; Tin Pan Alley and Liverpool but not jazz. Camp can be bad art or kitsch, but some serious art merits admiration in Camp terms, such as Louis Feuillade’s films.
Note 7 observes that Camp objects contain artifice; nothing in nature is campy. Rural Camp is man-made, but most Camp is urban, suggesting Empson’s “urban pastoral.” Note 8 says Camp loves the exaggerated and “off,” exemplified by Art Nouveau, which converts one thing into another—Hector Guimard’s Paris Métro entrances as cast-iron orchid stalks. Note 9 turns to Camp taste in persons, which favors the attenuated and exaggerated, especially the androgyne. Pre-Raphaelite figures, Art Nouveau bodies, and Greta Garbo are cited. Refined sexual attractiveness goes against one’s sex. Also relished is the exaggeration of sexual characteristics, as in Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Steve Reeves, and Victor Mature, and stylists of mannerism such as Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edwige Feuillière. Note 10 says Camp sees everything in quotation marks—not a lamp but a “lamp”—understanding Being-as-Playing-a-Role, extending life-as-theater. Note 11 declares Camp the triumph of the epicene style; all artifice is ultimately epicene; life and nature are not stylish. Note 12 asks when travesty acquires Camp flavor—why Shakespeare’s comedies are not epicene but Der Rosenkavalier is.
Note 13 locates the dividing line in the eighteenth century, the origins of Camp. Gothic novels, chinoiserie, caricature, and artificial ruins are cited. Then people patronized or remade nature—Strawberry Hill, Versailles. Today’s Camp effaces nature and is sentimental about the past. Note 14 offers a pocket history. One could begin with the mannerists—Pontormo, Rosso, Caravaggio—and Georges de La Tour, Euphuism in Lyly. But the soundest start is the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century, with its emphasis on artifice, surface, and symmetry: Pope, Congreve, Walpole (not Swift), les précieux, rococo Munich churches, Pergolesi, and later Mozart. In the nineteenth century, Camp becomes a special, esoteric, perverse taste, continuing through aestheticism—Burne-Jones, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson.
Note 15 distinguishes Art Nouveau from Camp. Art Nouveau is not simply Camp; a full analysis would not equate the two. Yet such an analysis cannot ignore what in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp. Art Nouveau is full of content, even of a political-moral sort; it was a revolutionary movement spurred by a Utopian vision, somewhere between William Morris and the Bauhaus group, of an organic politics and taste. Yet Art Nouveau objects also suggest a disengaged, unserious, “aesthete’s” vision. This tells us something important about Art Nouveau—and about what the lens of Camp, which blocks out content, is.
Note 16 explains that the Camp sensibility is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. This is not the familiar split-level construction of literal meaning versus symbolic meaning. It is the difference between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice. Note 17 discusses the vulgar use of “to camp” as a verb: a mode of seduction employing flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation—gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders. When the word becomes a noun, and a person or thing is “a camp,” a duplicity is involved: behind the “straight” public sense, one has found a private zany experience of the thing. A quote from An Ideal Husband follows: “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
Note 18 distinguishes between naive and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp—”camping”—is usually less satisfying. Note 19 explains that pure examples of Camp are unintentional and dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman making a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor trying to be charming; he is saying in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp—such as Busby Berkeley’s numbers for Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties, including 42nd Street and the Golddiggers films—does not mean to be funny. Camping, say the plays of Noel Coward, does. Much of the traditional opera repertoire could not be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions; the work tells all. Compare a typical nineteenth-century opera with Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the difference is clear.
Note 20 warns that intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These have fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they continually lose the beat. Perhaps it is not so much a question of unintended effect versus conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. Hitchcock’s films showcase this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals, even sporadically, a contempt for one’s themes and materials—as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest—the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp. Successful Camp—a movie like Carné’s Drôle de Drame, the film performances of Mae West and Edward Everett Horton, portions of the Goon Show—even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.
Note 21 says Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects don’t change when singled out by the Camp vision. Persons, however, respond to their audiences and begin “camping”: Mae West, Bea Lillie, La Lupe, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, Bette Davis in All About Eve. Persons can even be induced to camp without knowing it—consider how Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita. Note 22 says that, considered less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or wholly conscious, when one plays at being campy. An example of the latter: Wilde’s epigrams themselves. A quote from Lady Windermere’s Fan follows: “It’s absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
Note 23 states that in naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. 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 naive. Note 24 observes that when something is just bad, rather than Camp, it is often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted anything really outlandish. “It’s too much,” “It’s too fantastic,” “It’s not to be believed,” are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm. Note 25 declares that the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman.
The essay then turns to a broader consideration of sensibilities. Note 35 defines the standard for valuing art in high culture: seriousness, dignity, and success in fulfilling the artist’s intention, assuming a straightforward relation between intention and performance. This standard applies to works like The Iliad, Aristophanes’ plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, Rembrandt’s paintings, Chartres, Donne’s poetry, The Divine Comedy, and Beethoven’s quartets. It also applies to people such as Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, and Savonarola. This constitutes the pantheon of high culture, defined by truth, beauty, and seriousness.
Note 36 states that other creative sensibilities exist beyond this high-culture seriousness. A second sensibility has as its trademark anguish, cruelty, and derangement, accepting a disparity between intention and result. Examples from art include Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, and Artaud, as well as most important twentieth-century art, which aims to overstrain the medium with violent, unresolvable subject-matter. This sensibility insists that an oeuvre in the old sense is impossible; only “fragments” are possible. Different standards apply: something is good not because it is achieved, but because it reveals another truth about the human situation. The third sensibility is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness and the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.
Note 37 characterizes the first sensibility, high culture, as basically moralistic. The second, found in contemporary avant-garde art, gains power from a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic. Note 38 says Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world, incarnating a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” and irony over tragedy. Note 39 declares Camp and tragedy antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp, in the artist’s degree of involvement, and often pathos. The excruciating is a tonality of Camp, as seen in much of Henry James—The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove. However, there is never, never tragedy.
Note 40 says style is everything. Genet’s ideas are very Camp; his statement that “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” is virtually interchangeable with Wilde’s “in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.” What counts is the style in which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in Lady Windermere’s Fan and Major Barbara are Camp because they are held in a special, playful way. Genet’s ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing is too successfully elevated and serious, for his books to be Camp. Note 41 says the whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful and anti-serious, involving a new, complex relation to “the serious”: one can be serious about the frivolous, and frivolous about the serious. Note 42 observes that one is drawn to Camp when one realizes that “sincerity” is not enough, as sincerity can be simple philistinism or intellectual narrowness.
Note 43 argues that traditional means of going beyond straight seriousness—irony, satire—seem feeble today, inadequate for the culturally oversaturated medium. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality. Note 44 says Camp proposes a comic vision of the world, but not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is hyperinvolvement, comedy is underinvolvement and detachment. A quote from A Woman of No Importance is given: “I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex.” Note 45 states that detachment is the prerogative of an elite. As the dandy was the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in culture, Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp answers the problem of how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.
Note 46 describes the old-style dandy as overbred, with a posture of disdain or ennui, seeking rare sensations undefiled by mass appreciation. Models include Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ A Rebours, Marius the Epicurean, and Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. The dandy was dedicated to “good taste.” The connoisseur of Camp finds more ingenious pleasures, not in Latin poetry or rare wines, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures and the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile his objects, as he possesses them in a rare way. Camp makes no distinction between the unique and the mass-produced object, transcending the nausea of the replica. Note 47 identifies Wilde as a transitional figure. His early London attire—velvet beret, lace shirts, velveteen knee-breeches, black silk stockings—shows his conservatism, reflected in The Picture of Dorian Gray. However, his attitudes suggest something more modern. He formulated an important element of Camp—the equivalence of all objects—by announcing his intention of “living up” to his blue-and-white china and declaring a doorknob as admirable as a painting. By proclaiming the importance of the necktie, boutonniere, and chair, Wilde anticipated the democratic esprit of Camp.
Main Arguments
The central argument of “Notes on Camp” is that Camp is a distinct and recognizable modern sensibility, one that has not been adequately named or described. Sontag defines Camp as a love of the unnatural, of artifice, and of exaggeration. It is a mode of aestheticism that sees the world in terms of style and stylization rather than beauty or content. Camp is disengaged and depoliticized; it emphasizes texture, surface, and sensation over meaning. It sees everything in quotation marks, understanding life as theater and Being as Playing-a-Role.
Sontag argues that Camp operates through a double sense of things: the thing as meaning something versus the thing as pure artifice. This is not the familiar distinction between literal and symbolic meaning, but something more radical—a way of taking things that blocks out content entirely. Camp is alive to the possibility of experiencing anything as pure style. This is why Camp can embrace both high art and kitsch, both the unique object and the mass-produced replica. Camp makes no distinction between them.
A key argument concerns the relationship between intention and effect. Sontag distinguishes between naive and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive—unintentional and dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman making a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding; he is saying in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp does not mean to be funny. Camping, by contrast, is self-conscious and usually less satisfying. Intending to be campy is always harmful. The greatest Camp movies, like Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, maintain their tone effortlessly. Would-be Camp films like All About Eve and Beat the Devil fail because they want so badly to be campy that they lose the beat. The delicate relation between parody and self-parody is crucial: successful Camp, even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.
Sontag also argues that Camp rests on innocence. Camp discloses innocence but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects don’t change when singled out by the Camp vision, but persons respond to their audiences and begin “camping.” In naive or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness that fails—but only that seriousness which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive. The hallmark of Camp is extravagance.
The essay places Camp among three creative sensibilities. The first is high culture, defined by seriousness, dignity, and the successful fulfillment of intention. The second, found in much contemporary avant-garde art, is marked by anguish, cruelty, and derangement, accepting the impossibility of the finished oeuvre and valuing fragments that reveal truth about the human situation. The third is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness and the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of extreme feeling. The first sensibility is moralistic; the second gains power from the tension between moral and aesthetic passion; the third is wholly aesthetic.
Camp, Sontag argues, is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates the victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, and irony over tragedy. Camp and tragedy are antitheses; there is never, never tragedy in Camp. Style is everything. What counts is the style in which ideas are held. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful and anti-serious, involving a new relation to seriousness: one can be serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious.
Finally, Sontag argues that Camp answers a specific historical need. Traditional means of going beyond straight seriousness—irony and satire—seem feeble today, inadequate for a culturally oversaturated medium. Camp introduces artifice as an ideal and theatricality as a standard. It proposes a comic vision of the world, but not a bitter or polemical comedy. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite. As the dandy was the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in culture, Camp is modern dandyism. It answers the problem of how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. The old-style dandy sought rare sensations undefiled by mass appreciation, dedicated to good taste. The connoisseur of Camp finds more ingenious pleasures in the coarsest, commonest pleasures and the arts of the masses. Camp transcends the nausea of the replica by making no distinction between the unique and the mass-produced. Wilde is the transitional figure: his attitudes formulated the equivalence of all objects, anticipating the democratic esprit of Camp.
Key Concepts
The central concept of the essay is Camp itself, which Sontag defines through a series of overlapping formulations. Camp is a love of the unnatural, of artifice, and of exaggeration. It is a mode of aestheticism that sees the world in terms of style and stylization rather than beauty. It is disengaged, depoliticized, apolitical. It is both a way of seeing and a quality in objects and persons. Camp sees everything in quotation marks—not a lamp but a “lamp”—understanding Being-as-Playing-a-Role and extending life-as-theater.
Related to Camp is the concept of the epicene style. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style; all artifice is ultimately epicene. Camp taste in persons favors the androgyne—pre-Raphaelite figures, Art Nouveau bodies, Greta Garbo. Refined sexual attractiveness goes against one’s sex. Also relished is the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and stylists of mannerism.
Sontag introduces the distinction between naive and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive—unintentional and dead serious. Camping is self-conscious and usually less satisfying. Intending to be campy is always harmful. The essay also develops the concept of seriousness that fails: in naive or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness that fails, but only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive.
Another key concept is the double sense in which things can be taken. Camp is alive to the difference between the thing as meaning something and the thing as pure artifice. This is not the familiar split between literal and symbolic meaning. Related to this is the duplicity involved in Camp: gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders.
Sontag also develops the concept of sensibility itself. Taste governs every free human response; there is a logic of taste rooted in a consistent sensibility. A sensibility is almost ineffable; if crammed into a system, it hardens into an idea. The sensibility of an era is decisive but perishable. The essay identifies three creative sensibilities: high culture, defined by seriousness; the avant-garde sensibility of anguish and derangement; and Camp, the sensibility of failed seriousness and theatricalization.
The concept of the dandy is important to the essay’s historical argument. The dandy was the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in culture, overbred, with a posture of disdain or ennui, seeking rare sensations undefiled by mass appreciation, dedicated to good taste. Camp is modern dandyism, answering the problem of how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. The connoisseur of Camp finds pleasures in the coarsest, commonest things and transcends the nausea of the replica.
Themes
A central theme is the relationship between art and seriousness. Sontag explores how different sensibilities value art according to different standards. High culture values seriousness, dignity, and the successful fulfillment of intention. The avant-garde sensibility values the revelation of truth about the human situation, even at the cost of achievement. Camp values style over content, aesthetics over morality, irony over tragedy. Camp dethrones the serious; it is playful and anti-serious. One can be serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious.
Another theme is the relationship between Camp and tragedy. Sontag insists they are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp, and often pathos; the excruciating is a tonality of Camp, as in much of Henry James. But there is never, never tragedy. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world, but not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is hyperinvolvement, comedy is underinvolvement and detachment.
The theme of innocence and corruption runs through the essay. Camp rests on innocence. Camp discloses innocence but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects don’t change when singled out by the Camp vision, but persons respond to their audiences and begin “camping.” Persons can even be induced to camp without knowing it, as Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.
The essay also explores the theme of mass culture and the democratization of taste. The old-style dandy sought rare sensations undefiled by mass appreciation. The connoisseur of Camp finds pleasures in the coarsest, commonest things and the arts of the masses. Camp makes no distinction between the unique and the mass-produced object, transcending the nausea of the replica. Wilde anticipated this democratic esprit by proclaiming the importance of the necktie, boutonniere, and chair, and by declaring a doorknob as admirable as a painting.
A related theme is the historical transformation of aesthetic experience. Sontag locates the origins of Camp in the eighteenth century, with its Gothic novels, chinoiserie, caricature, and artificial ruins. In the nineteenth century, Camp becomes a special, esoteric, perverse taste, continuing through aestheticism. In the twentieth century, Camp answers the problem of how to be a dandy in an age of mass culture. Traditional means of going beyond straight seriousness—irony and satire—seem feeble today, inadequate for the culturally oversaturated medium. Camp introduces artifice as an ideal and theatricality as a standard.
The Author’s Conclusions
Sontag concludes that Camp is a modern sensibility that has emerged in response to specific historical and cultural conditions. It is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world, incarnating the victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, and irony over tragedy. Camp is the modern dandyism, answering the problem of how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. The old-style dandy sought rare sensations undefiled by mass appreciation; the connoisseur of Camp finds more ingenious pleasures in the coarsest, commonest pleasures and the arts of the masses. Camp makes no distinction between the unique and the mass-produced object, transcending the nausea of the replica.
Wilde emerges as the transitional figure who formulated an important element of Camp—the equivalence of all objects—by announcing his intention of “living up” to his blue-and-white china and declaring a doorknob as admirable as a painting. By proclaiming the importance of the necktie, boutonniere, and chair, Wilde anticipated the democratic esprit of Camp. The essay thus ends with a sense of Camp as a sensibility that has come into its own in the modern period, offering a way of negotiating the overwhelming abundance of cultural objects and experiences. Camp is a comic vision of the world, a mode of detachment that is the prerogative of an elite, yet one that finds its pleasures not in the rare and exclusive but in the common and the mass-produced. It is a way of being serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious, a way of dethroning the serious that nonetheless takes style as its highest value.
Significance
“Notes on Camp” is significant as one of the first sustained attempts to name and analyze a sensibility that had operated largely below the threshold of critical attention. Sontag’s essay helped to legitimize the study of taste and sensibility as serious intellectual concerns, and it introduced a vocabulary for discussing phenomena that crossed the boundaries between high and low culture. The essay’s influence can be seen in subsequent discussions of kitsch, camp, and the aesthetics of popular culture. Its form—the numbered notes, the aphoristic style, the mixture of examples from high art and mass entertainment—became a model for a certain kind of cultural criticism that sought to capture the fugitive qualities of contemporary experience.
The essay also stands as a document of its moment, reflecting the cultural ferment of the early 1960s and the questioning of established hierarchies of taste. Sontag’s willingness to take seriously such phenomena as Tiffany lamps, Flash Gordon comics, and the films of Busby Berkeley, while also engaging with the highest achievements of European culture, anticipated later developments in cultural studies and the academic study of popular culture. At the same time, the essay’s insistence on the aesthetic and apolitical nature of Camp, and its distinction between naive and deliberate Camp, offered a way of understanding the relationship between intention, effect, and value that remains provocative. The essay’s concluding reflections on dandyism and mass culture speak to enduring questions about the fate of aesthetic distinction in a world of mass production and mass appreciation.
