Camp (style)

The term camp—normally used as an adjective, even though earliest recorded uses employed it mainly as a verb—refers to the deliberate and sophisticated use of kitsch, mawkish or corny themes and styles in art, clothing or conversation. A part of the anti-Academic defense of popular culture in the sixties, camp came to academic prominence in the eighties with the widespread adoption of the Postmodern views on art and culture.

Related Topics:
Kitsch - Popular culture - Sixties - Eighties - Postmodern

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Today, camp falls into two distinct categories: intentional camp and uninitentional camp. Intentional camp, as the name suggests, constitutes the deliberate use of camp for humour. Unintentional camp is arises from naïvite or poor tastes. Unitentional camp can thus be considered "true camp."

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Much like the closely related notion of kitsch, camp has traditionally been viewed as hard to define. The terms "camp" and "kitsch" are often used interchangeably, but the term "kitsch" refers spefically to art, music or literature, while "camp" is a much broader term. All things kitsch are also camp, but not all things camp are kitsch. It is easier to grasp the concept of camp through the use of examples than through a definition. Numerous examples of camp are cited later in this article.

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Camp appears to be most prevelant in societies where disposable income has grown at a much faster pace than the general level of sophistication and education. The United States of the 1950's is a classic example of this phenomenon and 1950's America is probably the most camp time period in human history. During the 1950's, the standard of living and disposable income of the American people exploded, as the post-war economy boomed. Yet at the same time, most people were incredibly naïve and sheltered, and only a small minority of people had attended college. In essence, people had money to spend, but often excercised poor tastes due to their lack of sophistication.

Related Topics:
Standard of living - Disposable income

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As the Japanese economy began to boom in the 1970's and 1980's, Japan became a major producer of camp. As in America of the 1950's, Japanese disposable income had outpaced the general level of sophistication within Japanese society.

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One of the first people to give the concept of camp an academic treatment was the American intellectual Susan Sontag. In her famous 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'", Sontag emphasised artifice, frivolity, and shocking excess as key elements of camp. Most of the popular culture references in Sontag's essay are fairly obscure and would be lost on most of today's readers. While the common use of the concept includes these, usually the element of naïve middle-class pretentiousness is highlighted. Typical examples of this latter use are Carmen Miranda's tutti frutti hats, low-budget science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s and the multi-genre pop culture of the 1970s and 1980s. It has been argued that this view oversimplifies the camp phenomenon in an undesirable way, as it tends to equate the camp with popular culture, viewed with condescending irony, while the original concept included works definitely outside the realm of popular culture (Sontag herself mentions Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, which may be considered a minor work by musicologists but is hardly in the same range with soap operas or superhero comics).

Related Topics:
Susan Sontag - Notes on 'Camp' - Carmen Miranda - Tutti frutti - Science fiction - 1950s - 1960s - Multi-genre - 1970s - 1980s - Richard Strauss

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The first use of the word in print, marginally mentioned in the Sontag essay, may be Christopher Isherwood's 1954 novel The World in the Evening, where he comments: "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance."

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