Notes On "Camp" is a well-known essay by Susan Sontag organized around fifty-eight numbered theses. It was published in 1964 and was the author's first contribution to the Partisan Review. The essay created a literary sensation and brought Sontag her first brush with intellectual notoriety. It was published in 1966 in book form in Sontag's debut collection of essays, Against Interpretation (ISBN 087052352X). Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was a well-known American essayist, novelist, left-wing intellectual, and activist. ... Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003. ... Against Interpretation and Other Essays is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag which was published in 1966. ...

The essay codified and mainstreamed the cultural connotations of the word camp, and identified camp's evolution as a distinct aesthetic phenomenon. While camp, then as now, is often associated with gay culture, only three of Sontag's fifty-eight theses specifically mentioned homosexuality. The term camp—normally used as an adjective or a noun, even though earliest recorded uses employed it mainly as a verb— originally referred to the deliberate and sophisticated use of kitsch, mawkish or corny themes and styles in art, clothing or conversation. ... Since its coinage, the word homosexuality has acquired multiple meanings. ...

Cultural historians credit Sontag's essay for providing a groundwork for the popular understanding and reception of Pop Art in the 1960s, notably the work of Andy Warhol. House I, created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1996, is designed to be an optical illusion. ... Andy Warhol, photographed by Helmut Newton. ...

Quotes

9. Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.

41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

44. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

58. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . .

External links

• Thoughts on camp
• Gore Vidal on "Notes on 'Camp'"
• Satire on "Notes on 'Camp'"