Reviews

Notes on 'Camp' by Susan Sontag

_abii__'s review against another edition

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informative

4.5

 To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves.

Notes on camp is for lack of a better word: camp. It tries to explain the unexplainable and put a tangible definition on something that is not meant to have one. Despite this, it is able to write on paper what camp means and all its variations.
 
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much

If stylists read this before the 2019 met gala maybe we wouldn’t have lost the plot of what fashion is.
 
The book is divided in two segments. The first is written in vignetes, explaining what camp is. The second is an essay about how art and thecnology are intertwined. 

I really loved the essay. It puts into words how snobbery in art spaces needs to cease, but it also explains why art evolves. Why is contemporary art important and no less impressive than “old” art? 

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.
  
If you want a book to make you look like an intellectual and that focuses on art this is a read for you. 

oao's review against another edition

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10.
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.

30.
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

31
This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment— or arouses a necessary sympathy.

Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

Thus, things are campy, not when they become old but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.

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.

dismantled's review against another edition

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3.0

It’s okay. If anything, this made me realize how little I actually cared about camp in general lmao.

curiosophie's review against another edition

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challenging informative fast-paced

3.5

carmenx9's review against another edition

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4.0

'Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.'

Marginally of its time but a great read for pure enjoyment and some excellent opera and Art Nouveau chat. On that note, I have to disagree with Sontag that neither opera nor ballet can 'easily do justice to the complexity of human nature'. That said, she's right that Il trovatore is peak camp.

hanpowis's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced
not going to rate as i did feel slightly stupid reading it BUT i did enjoy it and wish this was required reading with the invite to the 2019 met gala (seriously where was the 2005 ashley tisdale piano bag/boot jeans/ skirt combo but redesigned by a modern designer) 

the second essay was very interesting to read as an artist 60 years later in which technology and art have become so interlinked with continuing conversations on the longevity of art with the widespread use of ai

emmacs03's review against another edition

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4.0

A fashion history classic- short and digestible with many insights on art, fashion, and life

toolittletime's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

4.0

mariefisken's review against another edition

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Sontag really looked Camp right in the eye with this one

fraulein's review against another edition

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4.0

anna wintour apologize to susan sontag right now