In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art signed up for a fierce parade when it hosted its annual fundraising event, the Met Gala, under the theme ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion.’ Inspired by a decidedly American mode of aesthetic sensibility and stimulated by Susan Sontag’s short essay ‘notes on camp,’ the evening set out on a fabulous journey to kitsch couture. No one could have better epitomized this than pop singer Lady Gaga, who, in her somewhat clichéd, Warholian 15min of super-fame-entrée, had unmistakably set the camp tone for the night.

But is declaring her performance as archetypically camp not inevitably neglecting and obscuring the complexities of its subject matter? And does that not lead us to the question: What defines camp? Admittedly, grasping camp is no facile endeavor. As much as its aestheticism immediately colonizes our attention, it substantially evades any intelligible definition. This rests on the unanimity that camp reveals itself as a sensibility. And as such, it can’t be “crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof […].”1 Sontag even goes so far as to caution: “to talk about camp is to betray it.”2

And yet, there is a specific apparatus of objects, practices and discourses which have unequivocally informed the camp sensibility. Originally a slang term, camp first entered linguistic usage during the Victorian era and was commonly construed as “actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis.”3 Later, a number of novelists took it up, above all Oscar Wilde, whose stylization as a dandy significantly influenced the camp imagery. Indeed, Wilde can be viewed as a pop camp figure avant la lettre. Not only because of his penchant for the

extravagant but also due to his, at the time, unconventional sartorial tastes. From then on, camp was instilled in the collective psyche of the frivolous urban class. Later, authors ranging from Christopher Isherwood to Susan Sontag and Esther Newton (Isherwood 1954, Sontag 1966, Newton 1972) would further investigate the camp sensibility and process its characteristics intellectually. While Andy Warhol not only personified but also produced pop queer camp in the age of mass consumerism on a visual level. 

Progressively, this has led to various camp modalities, not only expressed as a sensibility but as aestheticism, taste, style, cultural industry and subcultural discourse alike. Making camp an ever more pervasive yet impalpable form of representation. Similar to its original meaning, camp, to this day, is most commonly characterized as that which coquettes with the artificial, the surplus, the frivolous, the playful. Camp, therefore, is the most radical antithesis to nature. It always already comes in the form of an exaggeration, which implies that camp requires normativity and normalcy as its dialectical fellow. That is a standard norm from which camp can and must dissociate itself. At the same time, camp also, as Sontag detects, is a “good taste of the bad taste.”4 In other words, it signals a petty-bourgeois flirtation with trash. Then again, camp, in subcultural contexts at least, once served as a subversive tool to undergird the feeling of ‘difference’ as an asset, not a detriment. The difference here is understood as subject to the dynamic process of constant transformation and performativity. Perhaps, it’s precisely this “philosophy of transformation” 5 that renders camp a highly emancipatory factor for subjectivation processes - essentially suggesting that subjectivity and history are deeply informed by the transitional power of performance. Following that logic, subjects or identities are never stagnant fixtures but instead follow the logic of transformation, performativity, and continuous movement.

Seemingly, Warhol was aware of camp’s performative potentialities. Thus, role-play and his vicinity to flamboyant characters played a centrally important role in his oeuvre.

Whether it was the simple fact that he dreamed of nightclubs’ heterotopic tendencies (his factory serving as a prototypical club space) or that he continuously worked with stage performers, Warhol was clearly fascinated by camp’s ‘seductive mode.’6 On the other hand,

Warhol was also a close accomplice of pop culture’s market mechanisms. Thus, helped advance camp to become a “capitalist fetish.”7 Therefore, we must ask what sense we can still make of camp if it has become a cipher for the vested interest of global capital. What if camp can’t be read under the banner of a social movement anymore but has instead become a market segment? And if the masochist business elites co-opted camp as a marketable tool for product lines, isn’t camp then stripped off its subversive force? Already in the 1960s Herbert Marcuse famously coined the culture industry’s tendency to render subversion harmless a repressive desublimation.

Although scholarship has since partially reversed Marcuse’s pessimist stance, it’s up to debate what remains of the camp sensibility. Substantially a Western intervention, we need to ask ourselves if we can make camp a potent factor for the lived realities of Chinese artists and performers. Differently put, can we find comparable aesthetic articulations in China? Can we, otherwise, rearticulate camp for the Chinese context or do we need to discard it altogether and find a new language? Together with our guests, we want to ponder on the potentialities of camp under the aegis of global capital and ask if it can still serve as a potent reference system for identity political desires practiced from below.