 |
| Thomas Cooper Gotch Destiny ca. 1885-86 oil on canvas Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
"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 analyze 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."
 |
| Edwin Landseer Favourites (the property of HRH Prince George of Cambridge) ca. 1834-35 oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art |
 |
| William Merritt Chase Still-life with Hummingbird 1870 oil on canvas Indianapolis Museum of Art |
"Indeed, the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. . . . Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic 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."
 |
| Lawrence Alma-Tadema Vintage Festival 1871 oil on panel National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
 |
| Frédéric Bazille Summer Scene 1869 oil on canvas Harvard Art Museums |
 |
| Louis Comfort Tiffany Angel of the Resurrection 1904 leaded glass Indianapolis Museum of Art |
"To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste . . ."
 |
| Ford Madox Brown Pretty Baa-Lambs ca. 1851-59 oil on panel Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery |
 |
| Cornelius Krieghoff The Artist at Niagara 1858 oil on canvas Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto |
 |
| Ferdinand Bauer Passion Flowers 1812 oil on panel Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
 |
| Louis Ducos du Hauron Still-life with stuffed and mounted rooster and parakeet 1879 color transparency George Eastman House, Rochester, New York |
"Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice."
 |
| Max Klinger The Kiss 1880s etching, engraving, aquatint Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
 |
| Augustus Egg Travelling Companions 1862 oil on canvas Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery |
 |
| John Everett Millais Hearts are Trumps 1872 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
 |
| Rupert Bunny Summertime 1907 oil on canvas Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
"So, again, Camp rests 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 their audiences."
– quoted passages are by Susan Sontag, from the essay Notes on "Camp" (1964)