The Met Gala is a sort of pop-up zoo of rich Upper East Siders who want to feel public-spirited about showing off. This occurs because rich people get bored, and bored people do weird stuff. Regular nerds do cosplay and go to conventions, the hyper-rich … also do that.
Twitter and other social media observers had a field day with this year’s, because host Anna Wintour made the theme “camp” as inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Now, not everyone gay is an aesthete and not every gay aesthete has a foppish sensibility, but the frisson and therefore the fun of the theme was very clearly that gays have a certain hold on camp and a certain authority over its limits.
And the event was in good fun. Before the moralists and language police took so firm a hold over intellectual culture, we used to think playing dress-up was a type of childlike fun. Try to remember. It was about five years ago.
Of course, this didn’t stop the moralizing about “camp.” Colin Dickey, who is a kind and obscenely talented writer and also more than a bit too woke, felt the urge to produce a Twitter thread about the bad politics of Sontag’s 1964 essay. Sontag’s claiming “to be able to speak on behalf of subcultures that she claims cannot and should not speak for themselves.”
The claims that constantly changing moral standards must be applied to every past age will continue until morale improves. Anyway, the more people who read Sontag because of this, the better. Intellectuals used to say original and interesting things instead of enforcing social codes.
So what is camp? I might quote Sontag’s essay to flesh it out, but in the interest of space I’ll simply refer you to the 1997 “Simpsons” episode punnily titled “Homer’s Phobia.” Marge, it turns out, is unintentionally campy. We learn this when she goes to an antique shop run by a gay and campy-as-hell man who delights in all things out of place and over the top. Later, he says with mischievous relish in the Simpsons’ kitchen, looking at their off-yellow window curtains with a corncob pattern: “Oh, I’ve got the exact same curtains only in my bathroom! Didn’t you just die when you found these?” Marge: “Not really? They just had corn on them. Kitchen … Corn …”
And here’s Sontag: “In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”
Camp, then, is just bad taste that we decide is fun rather than off-putting. It’s the original and also the inverse of hipsters’ “wearing this ironically.” You’re in on the joke and don’t care who isn’t. The Simpsons’ house, designed to signal a striving middle-class naivete nostalgic for creator Matt Groening’s youth in Portland, is extremely camp. The family just doesn’t know it, because they can’t see their own charming ridiculousness without an outsider’s perspective. Today’s writers might take a lesson or two from this: It’s OK to write about what you aren’t, and it’s OK to look faintly ridiculous. Just, please don’t be boring. That’s not camp.
