Campgrounds

Simon Doonan over at Slate is worried that camp is dying.  Camp, as a style, is hard to define.  Generally, it's something affected or overdone.  It's also generally related to a gay sensibility, though it does seem to have spread into mainstream culture.  And it's usually regarding something originally meant to be taken seriously (for the most part), but is now taken ironically, though camp--certainly as Doonan describes it--can be created intentionally, but even then I suppose it's based on something that was once done straight.

If you want to know why Doonan is worried, read his short essay.  What bothers me more is the camp aesthetic in the first place.  It has its good points, in that it lets us revisit old, forgotten items and look at them in a new way, but still, it puts a layer between the observer and the object which I don't like, and don't think is necessary.

It's true, some old performance may seem hammy, or some old decor may seem tacky.  The way to deal with this is either acknowledge that standards used to be different and look beyond it, or accept it on its own terms.  Camp can take us in the wrong direction, both concentrating on, even fetishizing, the sillier parts of something, and, worse, condescending to it by reminding ourselves we're above it.  Add on to that a slight sense of shame that we're wasting our time on trash.

There are fine things from the past (and present for that matter) that you have to make allowances for, but I don't think you need to make excuses for.  To pick a classic example of camp, Busby Berkeley numbers.  They have a gaudiness and grandiosity that is sometimes hard to believe.  Yet, I think they're also very cleverly done and generally quite beautiful.  If you're tempted to laugh, fine, but you can also accept them for what they are, and enjoy them on their own merits.

Irony has its place, but its overuse tends to pointlessly demean.