By challenging clear historical trends, styles, and value systems, camp troubles the ability of the critic to define the term itself. In fact, failure is essential to camp. As Sontag writes, in pure camp, “the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails” (1964, [1999]). Camp has grand ambitions, and takes those ambitions seriously, but successful camp fails extravagantly.
Mark Booth attempts to provide a concise definition of camp from which everything else about the concept unfolds: “To be camp is to present oneself as being committed to the marginal with a commitment greater than the marginal merits” (“Camp-Toi!,” Camp, 1999). This idea of overenthusiasm for the underappreciated perhaps reveals part of the point of camp: to not just take seriously what others might revile, devalue, or dismiss, but to celebrate it.
Examples of camp can be found in any age, in high art and pop culture alike, from opera houses to vaudeville stages to political rallies. Cleto offers a list exemplifying camp’s capaciousness: he describes a “‘queer’ campground” that includes “Oscar Wilde with Charles de Gaulle and, yes, with Benito Mussolini (oh, dear)”; drag persona, Divine; “Caravaggio with Andy Warhol [...] Mozart with David Bowie” (1999).
In this guide, we’ll provide an overview of camp’s origins and essential points raised in Sontag’s groundbreaking “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Then we’ll examine some examples and debated types of camp, as well as camp’s intersections with queer culture and politics.
Origins of camp
Sontag dates camp’s aesthetic origins to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While examples of camp can be found in any age, Sontag considers this period “the soundest starting point” because of its “extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling” and its embrace of conventions like “the flourish (in gesture and in music)” that exhibit a cultural camp sensibility” ([1964], 1999). Rococo churches, the writings of Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole, and the (later) music and style of Mozart are classic illustrations of camp from this period.
In the nineteenth century, “what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse” (Sontag, [1964], 1999). In other words, the camp sensibility that had infiltrated high culture in general now became an exclusive taste of a select group of the elite, but also a taste that went against some prevailing cultural values/attitudes.
The nineteenth-century dandy is an important cultural precedent to the contemporary connoisseur of camp, with Oscar Wilde serving as a transitional figure. The dandy was “overbred,” indulging in exclusive experiences of “good taste” and elite detachment; camp, as the “modern dandyism,” finds pleasure in the low, the coarse, the art of the masses as much as aristocratic aesthetics (Sontag, [1964], 1999). All objects, for camp, are equivalent, from the mass-produced to the one-of-a-kind. As Sontag writes, “Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture”: