Camp
According to Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp", there are several features of camp.
1. 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 terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.
3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons.
4. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy . . .
5. 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.
6. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde's epigrams themselves.
"It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Lady Windemere's Fan
7. Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous.
8. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy.
9. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes
Sure I've just quoted very little of it. "Camp" is a difficult term to define, it is something you need to "feel" it. Yet, I feel, not only Oscar Wilde, as "felt" by susan Sontag is camp, but also Eileen Cheng too. I can see the "camp" in their writings, that "real human nature" they expressed.....which I really appreciate and admire, very much.
On the other hand, I feel myself as "camp", very "camp" as "cynical", "to be special", have my own way, appreciate my own "human nature", haha, that's it.
"CAMP", there is not another word more suitable to describe myself!
1. 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 terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.
3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons.
4. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy . . .
5. 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.
6. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde's epigrams themselves.
"It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Lady Windemere's Fan
7. Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous.
8. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy.
9. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes
Sure I've just quoted very little of it. "Camp" is a difficult term to define, it is something you need to "feel" it. Yet, I feel, not only Oscar Wilde, as "felt" by susan Sontag is camp, but also Eileen Cheng too. I can see the "camp" in their writings, that "real human nature" they expressed.....which I really appreciate and admire, very much.
On the other hand, I feel myself as "camp", very "camp" as "cynical", "to be special", have my own way, appreciate my own "human nature", haha, that's it.
"CAMP", there is not another word more suitable to describe myself!
posted by 太公 at 6:54 am
2 Comments:
J would be hard-pressed to qualify being "camp," but she's supreme any day. Well, sort of...
But, ey, do you really, really leave dents where you sit? :-D
not really....I sit on dents. :D
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