Yet camp, to Sontag, transcended homosexual mannerisms.

The Met Gala 2019 theme is framed around Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” The exhibition will focus on camp’s influence on art and culture. She also wrote on such subjects as theatre and film and such figures as writer Nathalie Sarraute, director Robert Bresson, and painter Francis Bacon. Among the objects Sontag names are Tiffany lamps, Aubrey Beardsley, “The Enquirer,” Bellini’s operas, women’s clothes of the twenties, and “stag movies seen without lust.” “The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance,” she wrote in her seminal essay, which presented 58 aspects of the “sensibility.”. Other articles where Notes on ‘Camp’ is discussed: Susan Sontag: …with an essay entitled “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in which she discussed the attributes of taste within the gay community. Camp is not simply a way of seeing (Kantian/idealist), but also a quality that inheres in objects: “the camp eye has the power to transform experience,” but only certain objects will work.

At the time Sontag published her essay, Camp, as a subversion of sexual norms, had also become a private code of signification for queer communities.In nearly every genre and form—from visual art, décor, and fashion to writing, music, and film—Camp continues to be redefined today, as seen in the 2019 Met Gala that took Sontag’s essay as the basis for its theme. F irst published in 1964, Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on Camp remains a groundbreaking piece of cultural activism.