#on camp

[notabeanie]

I remember seeing this quote about Susan Sontag, after she wrote Notes On Camp (tone marker: one of the most famous queer treatises in history) when everyone was speculating, wait what the fuck is Susan Sontag a leSBiAn ? Is she BiSExuAL ? (Tone marker: Da VInkY?) Is she allowed write about this?? And I forget who said it but there's this quote that's like, "Does the author of Notes On Camp even need to come out?"

Like, the book was so obviously queer, so obviously and intentionally centred the interests and wellbeing and knowledge of the queer community, that like 1) it couldn't not betray her queerness (which ofc it turned out she was in private) and 2) it didn't matter because her personal identity was irrelevant to the heavy lifting her writing was doing. Like if the work is queer, like deeply textually and subtextually queer, intentionally queer, and it's having a positive impact on the queer community, then that work is queer regardless of who made it and how publically queer they are or are not.

(And also ftr being openly queer is not a guarantee of your work being actually meaningfully queer, either. We know this because Pete Buttigieg exists.)

Anywas I think about that quote literally all the time. Like with Con O'Neil before he came out, or Taika Waiti. Occasionally people will jump all over some minutiae some celebrity said in an interview and pick apart how publically gay you have to be to say x or y, and it's homophobic to say z unless you're gay, or we're gonna willfully misinterpret everything you say. Or whatever. But what about when we're talking about people who have been hiring queer people, creating queer stories, for in some cases decades?

Like Con O'Neil has been playing beautiful well rounded queer people since before a lot of y'all were born. And did he ofc ultimately come out, yeah. But did he have to? What did it change, really? Does the actor who originated Izzy Hands and Val Uncle and Michael Scarborough Ahoy! have to come out? Does a producer and star of Our Flag Means Death have to come out? Why does the author of Notes On Camp need to come out? And for whose benefit?

Like ok listen at some point idk if you're on the lease at gay house but you've been sleeping on the couch long enough that you do just live here now. It just seems plain rude not to let you get your mail delivered.

[allthepresidentsmen1976]

"Camp does not ask permission. It marches to the beat of its own drum. You are king — or queen — of this particular stretch of sidewalk, simply because you woke up this morning and decided that it should be so. In such walks we spy resistance, defiance, joy. It is a miraculous matter that some people should be able to telegraph all these things simply by waking. It is as if, having realized that invisibility is not a viable option, they choose to do something practical with their constant audience. You looking at me? Well now, let me give you something to see!"

— Zadie Smith, from the essay 'Mark Bradford's Niagara' in her collection 'Feel Free'

[marlocandeea]

The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.

Susan Sontag, On Camp

[marypickfords]

“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a film simply because it concerns zombies and vampires, or because it shows explicit representations of violent deaths, or because it sacrifices storyline for the benefit of graphic effect, or because it considers style or action more important than content. Nevertheless, there is a significant sense in which the horror genre is regarded as second-rate, as cheap and low, and, as such, it attracts a highly positive, almost worshipful response from a whole host of its followers. Those audience members and critics who praise horror fictions generally do so because they are so easily assimilated into the ranks of camp. The essence of camp, according to Susan Sontag in her famous essay on the subject (1967), is its love of the unnatural — of artifice and exaggeration, qualities in which films like Bug abound: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in the degree of artifice, or stylization... (277). Camp, according to Sontag, is a different kind of aesthetic system, which allows contexts for the discovery of powerful and positive elements in texts ordinarily dismissed as “bad” and “low” in other aesthetic contexts. “Camp,” writes Sontag, “is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ and consequently, the connoisseur of camp finds a rare and specialized kind of pleasure in the ‘coarsest, commonest’ arts, the ‘arts of the masses’ ” (289). Camp, according to Sontag, asserts that good taste is not simply good taste — “hat there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste” (289). Still, the notions of “good taste” and “bad taste,” as well as “coarse,” “common,” and “mass,” are essentially subjectivist terms, made from within a strictly limited, conservative aesthetic context with its all-constricting polarities of “common” and “rare,” “coarse” and “refined,” “mass” and “elite.””

Mikita Brottman, from "High Theory/Low Culture", 2005.

[ariadnebridgestock]

SIGH

going to have to blacklist everything related to ghosts of the shadow market because I can't buy it online :/

I'll have to wait till the physical book is out to read it...

[marlocandeea]

Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of 'character'... Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'camp', they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

Susan Sontag, On Camp

[marlocandeea]

Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

Susan Sontag, On Camp