Susan Sontag wrote:35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds - in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it. We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward relation between intention and performance. By such standards, we appraise The Iliad, Aristophanes' plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven's quartets, and - among people - Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.
36. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture and of the high style of evaluating people. 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.
For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. This sensibility also insists on the principle that an oeuvre in the old sense (again, in art, but also in life) is not possible. Only "fragments" are possible. . . . Clearly, different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human - in short, another valid sensibility -- is being revealed.
And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.
37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary "avant-garde" art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.
38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy.
39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist's involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never, never tragedy.
40. Style is everything. Genet's ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet's statement that "the only criterion of an act is its elegance"2 is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde's "in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style." But what counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady Windemere's Fan and in Major Barbara are Camp, but not just because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held in a special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet's books to be Camp.
41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
42. One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity" is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.
Sontag is drawing up a number of false dichotomies here.
For one, she relegates to a category she calls "high culture" a series of emotions -- seriousness, tragedy, a strict sense of morality -- which actually have no more necessary connection to the works she gives as evidence than they do to any others. "Middlemarch" and Donne's poetry are sometimes serious and sometimes moralistic, but they are, much more often, funny and playful. Further, even when they are serious and moralistic, they are not such in any sort of cliched or tiresome sense. Their moral strength (for instance, Dorothea Brooke's insistence upon an acceptable husband) has nothing to do with preaching to the reader or appealing to rote principles of morality, whether religious or political. Works of genuine aesthetic strength fly past all of the simple-minded genre signifiers or general adjectives you might care to tag on them. They will always elude Sontag, because she thinks they are representing static theories while, in actuality, they are only using those theories as grist for their mill. Certainly, Shakespeare was one of the least moralistic and most bawdy and jocular of all authors, and one gets the sense that his work would be relegated by Sontag to the dustbin of her arbitrarily drawn category. I can't see any reason why Bach's music should be any more "serious" than the Smiths', for example. Most people rate his work much more highly than that of Camp new-wavers, not because his name has become a hallowed shibboleth of all that is conservative and untouchable, but because, in terms of quality, it is light years beyond anything the "Camp camp" has come up with.
If she wants to waste her time with John Waters movies or Frankie Vallee records, she can go ahead and do so. But she shouldn't expect me to want to. And she shouldn't call me a humorless churl for refusing to do so, either.
I also strongly disagree with her linkage of Camp with what I feel are the more genuine pleasures of the playful irony to be found in Wilde's work. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is a very carefully crafted play, one that, for all its hilarity, makes a number of very powerful points about how human interaction has become degraded by the spread of bourgeois conventionality. Wilde's epigrams are thought-provoking and challenging, forcing us out of our stale and outworn mental habits. Wilde's contrast of "style" and "sincerity" was not, as Sontag interprets it, a downplaying of sincerity or an appeal to meaninglessness. It was, rather, intended to point out that all of art is an illusion in the first place, and that, therefore, the weaving of that illusive weft must be done with care and precision. This care is what makes a work of art worth appreciating, but it doesn't seal off any emotional response to it. Rather, the illusions it creates must be drawn with such stylistic accuracy as to lead in (as it were, organically) to those genuine emotions and not shatter the whole thing by dispelling those illusions. Sontag's examples of Camp have nothing to do with actual art.
Henry James is now Camp? What? How does she make that leap? Is it because he was gay and liked to look at flowers and rugs?
In other words, she's creating a series of false dichotomies which naturally spring from her lazy use of genre signifiers and overly-general language. And I think that Camp is a pretty worthless, either as a sensibility or as an artistic philosophy. I think that Sontag's essay is evidence of a sort of writing style I strive to stay away from (other purveyors being people like David Sedaris or Robert Christgau). It's marked by a sort of hyper-aware New York hipness, and it loves to parade its knowledge of so much pseudo-cultural ephemera. Village Voice, look with shame at what thou hath wrought.