Notes on Notes on Camp

This is highly personal.

 I have no desire to produce camp. Let me rephrase: I cannot produce camp. I can only create a work — one that might fail on the surface level: in its effect, its performance, the audience’s experience, or rather, its aesthetic.

Yet it remains a failure if the author’s intention falls short of the goal. It remains a failure — a sincere failure. And yet, sincerity is not enough.

I have no desire to delight through style, artifice, exaggeration, or playfulness over content — perhaps because I lack the cultivated sensibility to appreciate camp. or to be celebrated for my shortcomings, perhaps out of fear: fear of failure, that the goal might simply fall out of reach.

I’m so tired of disappointments.
I want to be fulfilled.
I’m just a man.
I need to be fulfilled.

Camp cannot fulfill. It can only entertain — but even that is not passive entertainment; that is the domain of kitsch. Camp will not elicit a true reaction from me; that is reserved for the avant-garde.

Giving a name and a description to a thing allows us to articulate its existence, establishing conditions and rules — creating an image, almost like a guide. The more a thing can be described, the more we produce what amounts to an instruction manual for creating it.

Yet, as Susan Sontag emphasizes, camp cannot be intentionally produced; it must emerge almost accidentally, as a byproduct of effort. An artwork or production moves through different stages: pre-production, production, and post-production. The more layers there are, the more complex the work becomes, and the greater the chance for something to go awry.

One might assume that, through careful description and categorization, camp could be deliberately manufactured. But this is precisely where Sontag’s insight is critical: the author or creator must remain unaware that they are producing camp. Camp exists when, despite intention, the surface effect is exaggerated, stylized, or theatrical in ways the artist does not consciously aim for. It is the unselfconscious overreach, the unintended theatricality, that defines it.

In other words, camp resists direct control or manualized production. It is a sensibility that arises in the space between intention and effect, something that can be recognized, named, and enjoyed — but never manufactured at will. To preserve its potency, camp must remain elusive; it must operate according to the rules of existence, production, and consumption, embedded in human nature itself.

“The play might have been brilliant, but the audience was utterly awful.”

I will resist admitting that I, too, might unknowingly enjoy camp.

 Yet, like the occasional indulgence in a cold pizza, I do find moments of enjoyment in it.

Right before I go to sleep, I seek distraction — a numbing effect — in a bad movie,

one I won’t remember the next morning.

Not so bad that it frustrates me, of course; I tend to favor rom-coms.

As long as I don’t remember it in the morning, it serves its purpose.

My taste in the movies I watch right before bed is quite different from my taste in the movies, I buy a ticket for. I remain the same person, yet my taste shifts. The movie I might watch before sleep will not disappoint me if it underdelivers; I will survive its flaws. In contrast, a movie I actively choose and pay for can fill me with disappointment if it fails to deliver — disappointment compounded by financial regret and the wasted time I invested in viewing it.

Yet, as Susan Sontag argues, the entertainment value found in camp is still worth exploring and examining. Perhaps she allows it a place within the broad spectrum of works produced to accommodate our shortcomings. Or perhaps camp is truly necessary to differentiate between the avant-garde and kitsch. The avant-garde demands reflection, often forcing the audience to engage critically, whereas kitsch remains mass-produced, sentimental, and easy to consume — the same rom-com story, told with different actors, designed for effortless enjoyment.

Camp, by contrast, remains playful, ironic, and light-hearted. Sontag sees in it a kind of creative potential — a “democratization” of taste. Yet taste itself remains central to the definition of camp; it is what distinguishes the cultivated sensibility needed to recognize and appreciate its subtleties.

A cultivated sensibility that I am so scared to explore.

I feel like I must face failure as part of the effort of production

 With such a detailed description she provided of camp

I wish there were advice on how not to produce camp.

If she can describe it so well, give it a name, then how can she claim that it’s a quality that can only be found, not produced intentionally?

Should I fail on purpose to prove her wrong

In Susan Sontag’s view, taste is the key to distinguishing camp from kitsch or the avant-garde. Her refined sensibility allows her to recognize when a performance fails to meet an artwork’s intention — when sincerity collapses into excess, or when style overwhelms content. For Sontag, the intention must remain serious, even if the result becomes playful or exaggerated; camp does not judge seriousness or content, but rather, it takes style seriously.

Yet taste, as Pierre Bourdieu reminds us in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, is never innate. It is learned, shaped, and socially performed. Bourdieu dismantles the illusion of “personal preference,” showing that taste is instead a product of social conditioning — structured by three key forces: habitus, cultural capital, and field.

• Habitus refers to the internalized dispositions shaped by one’s upbringing and environment — the subtle ways we perceive, feel, and respond to culture.

• Cultural capital encompasses education, knowledge, and exposure — the resources that enable individuals to evaluate and navigate the arts.

• Taste, ultimately, becomes both a reflection and reinforcement of social hierarchy — a means of distinction and exclusion.

From this perspective, Sontag’s confidence in her own taste is not merely aesthetic but profoundly social. Her ability to classify and articulate camp depends on a cultivated sensibility — one paradoxically grounded in the very structures of privilege and access that Bourdieu exposes. Her “refined taste” is, in effect, a form of cultural capital, allowing her to recognize nuances that others might overlook.

Yet, this very cultivation produces a paradox: the universality Sontag attributes to camp — its supposed “democratization of taste” — remains bound by the limits of her own perspective. Taste may circulate among individuals within certain urban or intellectual proximities, but it rarely escapes them. What she reads as sensibility might, to others, appear as exclusivity — an aesthetic that claims to embrace irony and play, yet still polices who is “in” on the joke.

I’m scared that the entire logic is only based on her taste

Susan and I share a few things: we’re smart, sexy, have a great haircut,

and most importantly, we have great taste. We’re both superior. she more than me

But still, I’m not in on the joke, only those fluent in irony can enter.”im not one of them

I still can’t seem to value camp

You can judge my appearance — I judge yours too.
But not when we discuss thoughts

you should know: in a private setting, I prefer to be called sexy far more than smart. But smart too.

In a public setting, I ignore the charming person — the one who is well-dressed, effortlessly beautiful, light in spirit, easy to be around, delightful even. I dismiss his presence, and I ignore his opinions.
But in private? I really wish they would call me sexy

Who Decides Taste? Right now its not me

For a long time, the tastemakers were those who controlled the market — the ones others aspired to imitate or please. They dictated what was beautiful, valuable, and worthy of attention. The reason people buy a Gucci belt or a Louis Vuitton bag they can barely afford is not for the object itself, but for the symbolic access it promises: entry into the aesthetic codes of those who define taste.

Historically, the tastemakers were the bourgeoisie — the social elite who, paradoxically, also supported the avant-garde. Yet their support was never without self-interest. The elite liked to imagine themselves as apart from society, but they remained tied to it through capital — through gold, patronage, and cultural prestige. Their investment in “innovation” was often just another way of reaffirming their own distinction.

Today, tastemakers still exist — only their faces have changed. They are rappers, actors, influencers, and celebrities: people whose images we consume and whose lifestyles we try to emulate. But the cultural logic remains the same — taste still trickles down through aspiration and imitation.

The troubling shift is that the culture which once sustained the avant-garde — by financing, engaging with, or even reacting against it — has abandoned it altogether. Contemporary culture rewards the reproducible, the marketable, the kitsch. Yet no avant-garde can survive without a social base, without a community willing to support experimentation, without the economic stability that allows artists to take risks.

Because when those risks fail, we can call it camp rather than kitsch.

It’s difficult to write about kitsch without invoking Clement Greenberg, who reminds us that if the avant-garde imitates the process of art, kitsch imitates its effect. Kitsch is the echo of originality — the reproduction of value, not its creation. Camp, however, remains in conversation with originality; it still gestures toward something authentic, even if it stumbles theatrically along the way.

But to perceive camp requires education, exposure — conditioning. It requires time. And time allows for detachment, yes, but also for forgetfulness.

Sincerity is not enough.
I fail dramatically, all the time.

I have great taste — it feels unfair that I must still worry about paying rent on time. That I work thirty hours a week serving coffee and washing dishes.

Sincerity is not enough. It will not pay my rent as I write this.

But I’m so lucky that I know what camp is .

I should have gone to business school, no that’s a joke my mom makes.

Tragedy cannot be camp.

But a performance of a tragedy could.

Time provides detachment.
Time also controls taste.

In reality, time is both cruel and, paradoxically, fair. It refines and erodes. Right now, I cannot fully comprehend time or its effects — it can only be understood in retrospect. Time changes everything: my taste, my understanding of an artwork, even my love for architecture. Time is something to be feared — at least, I fear it above all things. Time is cruel; it ignores me when I beg it to hold still, even for a moment, or to slow down my mother’s aging. Time is the reason I could not understand all of Susan Sontag’s references in her essay.
Time is what separates me from her world — her cinema, her camp, her seriousness. And yet, perhaps, given enough time, I too might learn to enjoy my failures, laugh at their effects, and move on.

She seems really kind

Avant-garde would be her every day.
Avant-garde would be me on those rare occasions when I actually manage to align.
Camp would be me pretending I’m aligned on a bad day.
High kitsch would be Anish Kapoor and Jeff Koons — every day.
Camp would be the Met Gala — every now and then.
And Trump would be the lowest form of kitsch since the day he was born.
Correction: Trump isn’t even kitsch — he’s just a word that rhymes with door, more, core... but starts with a “W.”

She seems really kind , to find a space for my failure that is yet to come .