Notes on ‘Camp’ Quotes

“Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman'.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“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.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility. It has hardened into an idea ...”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“To talk about camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard –and the most articulate audience– of Camp.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, 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 naïve.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine…”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“It’s good because it’s awful”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” - Lady Windermere’s Fan”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“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.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“contemporary art reasserting its existence rather than as individual personal expression”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“A great work of art is never simply (or even mainly) a vehicle of ideas or of moral sentiments. It is, first of all, an object modifying our consciousness and sensibility, changing the composition, however, slightly, of the humus that nourishes all specific ideas and sentiments.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“One must distinguish between naive and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is usually less satisfying.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:

Zuleika Dobson
Tiffany lamps
Scopitone films
The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Aubrey Beardsley drawings
Swan Lake
Bellini's operas
Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards
Schoedsack's King Kong
the Cuban pop singer La Lupe
Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man
the old Flash Gordon comics
women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)
the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett
stag movies seen without lust”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

“30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

“Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artífice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric - something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Gaudi's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal — most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia — the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’