page 1 – ‘Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.’
page 2 – ‘I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyse it, he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.’
page 4 – ‘To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.’
page 8 – ‘All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy.’
page 9 – ‘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 a theatre.’
page 11 – ‘A pocket history of Camp might, of course begin farther back – with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso and Caravaggio, or the extraordinary theatrical painting of Georges de La Tour, or Euphemism (Lyly, etc) in literature. Still the soundest starting point seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century, because of that period’s extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; it;s taste for the picturesque and the thrilling.’
page 15 – ‘So, again, Camp resists on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also when it can, corrupts it. Objects, being objects, don’t change when they are singled out by the Camp vision. Persons, however, respond to the audiences.’
page 21 – ‘Camp is the glorification of ‘character’… What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character’ (this is, of course, very 18th century); and, conversely what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element of the theatricalisation of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility.’
Notes from: One Culture and the New Sensibility, (from ‘Against Interpretation and Other Essays’) 1966.
page 39 – ‘This new sensibility is rooted, as it must be, in our experience , experiences which are new in the history of humanity – in extreme social and physical mobility: in the crowded-ness of the human scene (both people and material commodities multiplying at a dizzying rate).’
page 48 – ‘Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibility count. It is to theses that contemporary art addresses itself. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.’
page 51 – ‘one cannot have a work of art that does not impinge upon the human sensorium.’
page 55 – ‘The point is that there are new standards, new standards of beauty and style and taste. The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia , it is also extremely history – conscious.’