AGE OF WARHOL

Susan Sontag, 1964.

From Warhol and Hackett, POPism:

When I saw Susan Sontag [at David Bourdon’s party in Brooklyn Heights], I asked David how he’d snagged her, because she was considered the dazzling intellect of the year. She’d just published her famous essay in the Partisan Review on the difference between high, middle, and low “camp,” and she was very influential – she wrote about literature, pornography, films (especially Godard), art, anything. David told me that he’d heard she didn’t think too much of my painting – “I hear she suspects your sincerity,” he said. Well, that was no surprise, since a lot of dazzling intellects felt that way. (111-12)

From Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964):

56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” … Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

(Here, one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which – when it is not just Camp – embodies an attitude that is related, but still very different. Pop Art is more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.)

More on camp here.