Camp (style)

Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value. Camp aesthetics disrupt many of modernism's notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption.

Camp can also be a social practice. For many it is considered a style and performance identity for several types of entertainment including film, cabaret and pantomime. Where high art necessarily incorporates beauty and value, camp necessarily needs to be lively, audacious and dynamic. "Camp aesthetics delights in impertinence." Camp opposes satisfaction and seeks to challenge.

Camp art is related to—and often confused with—kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as "cheesy". When the usage appeared in 1909, it denoted ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, and/or effeminate behavior, and by the middle of the 1970s, the definition comprised: banality, artifice, mediocrity and ostentation so extreme as to have perversely sophisticated appeal. American writer Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964) emphasized its key elements as: artifice, frivolity, naive middle-class pretentiousness, and 'shocking' excess. Camp as an aesthetic has been popular from the 1960s to the present.

Camp aesthetics were popularised by filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar, Jack Smith and his film Flaming Creatures, and later John Waters, including the last's Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, and Polyester. Celebrities that are associated with camp personas include drag queens and performers such as Dame Edna Everage, Divine, RuPaul, Paul Lynde, and Liberace. Camp was a part of the anti-academic defense of popular culture in the 1960s and gained popularity in the 1980s with the widespread adoption of postmodern views on art and culture.

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