"Notes on 'Camp'" is a 1964 essay by Susan Sontag that brought the aesthetic sensibility known as "camp" to mainstream consciousness. [1] [2]
"Notes on 'Camp'" is a 1964 essay by Susan Sontag that brought the aesthetic sensibility known as "camp" to mainstream consciousness. [1] [2]
"Notes on 'Camp'" was first published as an essay in 1964, and was her first contribution to the Partisan Review . [3] The essay attracted interest in Sontag.
The essay was republished in 1966 in Sontag's debut collection of essays, Against Interpretation . [4] The essay considers meanings and connotations of the word "camp". [2]
The essay is structured with a brief introduction, followed by a list of 58 "notes" on what camp is, or might be.
Christopher Isherwood is mentioned in Sontag's essay: "Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954), [camp] has hardly broken into print." [2] In Isherwood's novel two characters are discussing the meaning of camp, both High and Low. Stephen Monk, the protagonist, says:
You thought it meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich? Yes, in queer circles they call that camping. … You can call [it] Low Camp…High Camp is the whole emotional basis for ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art … High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love … [5]
Then examples are given: Mozart, El Greco and Dostoevsky are camp; Beethoven, Flaubert and Rembrandt are not. [6]
The 2019 haute couture art exhibit Camp: Notes on Fashion , presented by the Anna Wintour Costume Center at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, was built around Sontag's essay by Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute. [7] [8]
Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value. Camp aesthetics disrupt many of modernism's notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption.
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others, as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
Bathos is a literary term, first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay "Peri Bathous", to describe an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness. Bathos has come to refer to rhetorical anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one, occurring either accidentally or intentionally. Intentional bathos appears in satirical genres such as burlesque and mock epic. "Bathos" or "bathetic" is also used for similar effects in other branches of the arts, such as musical passages marked ridicolosamente. In film, bathos may appear in a contrast cut intended for comic relief or be produced by an accidental jump cut.
Against Interpretation is a 1966 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style," and the eponymous essay "Against Interpretation." In the latter, Sontag argues that the new approach to criticism and aesthetics neglects the sensuous impact and novelty of art, instead fitting works into predetermined intellectual interpretations and emphasis on the "content" or "meaning" of a work. The book was a finalist for the Arts and Letters category of the National Book Award.
In the French courts during the 17th Century, ballet first begins to flourish with the help of several important men: King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Pierre Beauchamps, and Molière. The combination of different talents and passions of these four men shaped ballet to what it is today.
Osbert Lancaster's Drayneflete Revealed, is an illustrated book on architectural style.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), by Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura (uniqueness) of a work of art, and that in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics. Written during the Nazi régime (1933–1945) in Germany, in the essay Benjamin presents a theory of art that is "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art" in a society of mass culture.
Flaming Creatures is a 1963 American experimental film directed by Jack Smith. The film follows an ensemble of drag performers through several disconnected vignettes, including a lipstick commercial, an orgy, and an earthquake. It was shot on a rooftop on the Lower East Side on a very low budget of only $300, with a soundtrack from Smith's roommate Tony Conrad. It premiered April 29, 1963 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village.
"Inside the Whale" is an essay in three parts written by George Orwell in 1940. It is primarily a review of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller with Orwell discoursing more widely over English literature in the 1920s and 1930s. The biblical story of Jonah and the whale is used as a metaphor for accepting experience without seeking to change it, Jonah inside the whale being comfortably protected from the problems of the outside world. It was published, alongside two other pieces by Orwell, 11 March 1940 by Gollancz in Orwell's first collection of essays, Inside the Whale and Other Essays.
Styles of Radical Will is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1969. Among the subjects discussed are film, literature, politics, and pornography. It is Sontag's second collection of non-fiction after Against Interpretation, which was published in 1966. Most of the essays in this book were originally published in Aspen, Partisan Review, the Tulane Drama Review, Sight and Sound, and Esquire.
The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood is a quasi-fictional account of love, loss, and regret. As in many Isherwood novels, the main character is caught in a contest between his personal egoism and the needs of friends and lovers.
Bonnie Cashin was an American fashion designer. Considered a pioneer in the design of American sportswear, she created innovative, uncomplicated clothing that catered to the modern, independent woman beginning in the post-war era through to her retirement from the fashion world in 1985.
Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic, social critic and feminist. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
You're Invited to Mary-Kate & Ashley's is a musical direct-to-video series starring Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. The videos were released between 1995 and 2000 and have since been released on VHS in 2000-2001 and on DVD in 2003.
Visual marketing is the discipline studying the relationship between an object, the context it is placed in and its relevant image. Representing a disciplinary link between economy, visual perception laws and cognitive psychology, the subject mainly applies to businesses such as fashion and design.
Douglas Ferguson is a multidisciplinary artist mainly known for his fashion designs using enamelled metal mesh and hand-painted leather which received widespread exposure in the 1980s. Since starting out in the 1970s as Diana Vreeland's voluntary assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, he has also worked as an interior designer and film-maker.
Yale Union was a nonprofit contemporary art center in southeast Portland, Oregon, United States. Located in the Yale Union Laundry Building built in 1908, the center was founded in 2008. In 2020, the organization announced it would transfer the rights of its building to the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF). It dissolved the nonprofit after wrapping up its program in 2021 and completing the building and land transfer. The space is now the Center for Native Arts and Cultures.
Phyllis Green is an artist and educator based in the Los Angeles area. She has largely focused on sculpture using a wide range of materials and fabrication techniques to explore objects and their social context, gender politics, consumerism and spirituality, but has also produced video, installation and performance art. Critics characterize her work by its craft and engagement with surface appearance, diverse sources, unconventional juxtapositions, and grounding in the female body and metaphorical content. Her early work grew out of 1970s feminism and consciousness-raising, while her later work has taken inspiration from the Vedanta branch of Hindu spirituality. In 2018, Sculpture critic Kay Whitney wrote, "Green's polymorphously perverse and experimental thinking counters art historical assumptions regarding gender and culture, while her pun-making glittering and whimsical imagery acts as a shadow-screen for the serious and profound."
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