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NOTES ON CAMP
525
is of no importance:-except, of course, to the person (Loie Ful–
ler, Gaudi, Cecil
B.
De MiJIe, Crivelli, De Gaulle, etc. ) who
makes
"it.
What the Oamp
eye,. a.ppre<;:i~tes
is the ucity, the force 'of
the '
~rson.
In every move
M~rtha G~aham ~~k~
she's
bclnS
Martha Graham, etc., etc.... This is clear in the case of the great
serious idol of Camp taste, Greta Garbo. Garbo's incompetence (at
the least, lack of depth) as an
actress
enhances her beauty. She's
always herself.
33. What Camp taste responds to
is
"instant character"; and,
conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of
character. (This is, of course, very eighteenth-century.) Character
is
understood as a state of continual incandescence-a person being
one, very intense thing. This taste in character is a key eleIT\.ent of
the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility.
And it helps account for the fact that opera and ballet are experienced
as such rich treasures of Camp, for neither of these forms can
easily do justice to the .complexity of human nature. Wherever there
is
development of character, Camp
is
reduced. Among operas, for
example,
La Traviata
(which has some small development of
character)
is
less campy than
Il Trovatore
(which has none).
"Life is too important a thing ever
to talk seriously about it."
-Vera,
Or
the Nihilists
34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary
esthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue
that the good
is
bad, or the bad
is
good. What
it
does is to offer
for art (and life) a different-a supplementary-set of standards.
35. Ordinarily we value a work of
art
because of the serious–
ness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds,
in being what
it
is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that
lies behind
it.
We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward
relation between intention and performance. By such standards, we
appraise
The Iliad,
Aristophanes' plays, "The
Art
of the Fugue,"
Middlemarch,
the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the
poetry
of
Donne,
The Divine Comedy,
Beethoven's quartets, etc., etc.; and–
among people-Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola,
and so forth. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty,
and seriousness.