Camp
"Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste." In her well known 1964 piece, Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag summarized the fundamental paradox that occupies the heart of "camp," a parodic attitude toward taste and beauty which was at that time emerging as an increasingly common feature of American popular culture. Avoiding the drawn-out commentary and coherence of a serious essay format, Notes on Camp dashes off a stream of anecdotal postures, each adding its own touches to an outline of camp sensibility. "It's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp," Sontag writes. "One runs the risk of having produced a very inferior piece of Camp." And she was right. To take camp seriously is to miss the point. Camp, a taste of bad taste which languishes between parody and self parody, doesn't try to succeed as a serious statement of taste, but stages its own failure as taste by doing and overdoing itself. In this way, failure is camp's greatest triumph and to take it away through a serious analysis would, for Sontag, be tantamount to an annihilation of the subject. In fact, since camp's self-parody leaves no durable statement of taste, it should only be spoken of as a verb: "camping," the act of subverting a taste by exaggerating its pomp and artifice to the point of absurdity.
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