CONCEPT
Camp (Sensibility)
Sontag's 1964 anatomy of the aesthetic that loves the
unnatural, excessive, and artificial — finding value in failed seriousness and extravagant style, distinct from AI's aesthetic of the merely plausible.
In "Notes on 'Camp,'" Sontag defined camp as a sensibility — not a set of ideas but a mode of perception — that finds aesthetic pleasure in the exaggerated, the artificial, the thing that is what it is to a degree that exceeds necessity. Camp loves the failed serious attempt that becomes, through its failure, a triumph of inadvertent style. It is the sensibility that can look at a Tiffany lamp, a Busby Berkeley musical, or a performance of
Swan Lake and perceive not merely kitsch but a commitment to artifice so total that it achieves a kind of aesthetic purity. Sontag insisted camp is not mere bad taste; it is the relocation of taste to a different axis — from depth to surface, from the natural to the artificial, from the serious to the playful. The camp sensibility requires double vision: perceiving simultaneously that something is ridiculous
and that it is wonderful. Without the double vision, the appreciation collapses into either straight enjoyment (missing the