Camp is an exaggerated, theatrical aesthetic sensibility. From Sontag's 1964 essay to the Met Gala to drag culture, learn how camp became a way of seeing art.
In 1964, a 31-year-old American critic named Susan Sontag published an essay called "Notes on 'Camp'" in the Partisan Review. It was 58 numbered notes, not a continuous argument, because Sontag believed that camp was too elusive for a manifesto. "It's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp," she wrote. "One feels that one ought to go about it in a less hasty, less direct way." The essay was a sensation. It brought the word "camp" into mainstream intellectual discourse and defined a sensibility that had been circulating in queer subcultures for decades without a name. In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute exhibition "Camp: Notes on Fashion" used Sontag's essay as its framework, tracing camp from the courts of Louis XIV to the runways of contemporary fashion. In 2026, the Schwules Museum in Berlin presents "Susan Sontag: Seeing and Being Seen," an exhibition exploring Sontag's intellectual legacy and her influence on queer culture, with a section dedicated to the impact of "Notes on Camp." Read more at Schwules Museum Berlin.
Camp is an aesthetic sensibility characterized by exaggeration, theatricality, artifice, and irony. It is a way of seeing the world not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of stylization. Camp favors the artificial over the natural, the exaggerated over the restrained, the theatrical over the sincere. It finds pleasure in things that are "so bad they're good" and in things that are deliberately, knowingly over-the-top. Sontag defined it as "the consistently aesthetic experience of the world" and "a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy."
This entry covers what camp is, how it developed from queer subculture to mainstream aesthetic, which thinkers and artists defined it, and how it functions in contemporary culture.
Camp is not a style or a movement. It is a sensibility: a way of responding to cultural objects. Sontag's essay identified its core features. "The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration," she wrote. "And Camp is esoteric, something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques." Camp is not about beauty. It is about the appreciation of things that are excessive, theatrical, and self-consciously artificial. A feather boa is camp. A velvet painting of Elvis is camp. A Baroque church interior dripping with gold and cherubs is camp. A B-movie with overwrought dialogue and improbable costumes is camp.
The word "camp" has its origins in the French verb se camper, meaning "to posture boldly" or "to flaunt." The Oxford English Dictionary records the first print use in 1909, defining it as "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual." The word circulated in queer subcultures in the early 20th century as a private language, a way of recognizing fellow outsiders through shared references and a shared way of seeing. Sontag's essay brought this private code into public view, which was both its achievement and its transgression. Camp, by its nature, is supposed to be esoteric. Making it public changes it.
Camp originated in the queer subcultures of European and American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In a society that criminalized homosexuality and pathologized gender nonconformity, camp provided a coded language for communication and a strategy for survival. Camp humor, with its love of exaggeration, parody, and role-playing, allowed queer people to navigate a hostile world by turning its conventions into performance. The figure of the "dandy" was an early camp type: a man who dressed with exaggerated refinement as a way of asserting individuality against bourgeois conformity. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is the archetypal camp figure, both in his writing and in his public persona. His epigrams, his velvet coats, his cultivation of paradox and wit, all embody the camp sensibility. Sontag noted that "the androgynous being is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility."
Sontag's essay was the first serious intellectual treatment of camp. She wrote it at a time when the cultural hierarchy between high art and popular culture was beginning to collapse. Pop Art was emerging. The avant-garde was losing its authority. Camp offered a way to appreciate popular culture without simply surrendering to it. Camp appreciation is not passive consumption. It is an active, knowing, ironic engagement with cultural objects that recognizes their excess and their failure and loves them for it.
Sontag's 58 notes cover the characteristics of camp, its history, its relationship to art, and its limitations. Some of the most quoted notes: "Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. Not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization." "Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy." "Camp is a tender feeling." This last note is often overlooked. Camp is not simply mockery. It involves affection for the objects it appreciates, even when those objects are absurd.
A 2025 article in Doing History in Public notes that "fifty years ago (fifty-one actually) art critic Susan Sontag published 'Notes on camp,' a series of reflections on Camp culture" and that the essay "was not meant to be a manifesto, but rather a tool to define and understand 'camp' sensitivity." The article traces how camp evolved from a private code into a "shared mode paraded in art and cultural artifacts produced by Western post-human society." Read more at Doing History in Public.
Sontag identified Art Nouveau as a proto-camp movement. "Art Nouveau objects turn, and this is typical, one thing into something else," she wrote: "the lighting in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is actually a cave." Art Nouveau's deliberate artificiality, its love of organic forms translated into decorative objects, and its refusal of functionalist restraint all anticipate camp. But Sontag also noted that "a full analysis of Art Nouveau, for instance, would scarcely equate it with Camp. Art Nouveau is full of 'content,' even of a political-moral sort." Camp is not the same as Art Nouveau. Camp is a way of seeing Art Nouveau that focuses on its artifice and theatricality rather than its political or moral content.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2019 exhibition "Camp: Notes on Fashion" was the most prominent institutional recognition of camp as an aesthetic category. Curated by Andrew Bolton of the Costume Institute, the exhibition featured approximately 250 objects, including womenswear, menswear, sculptures, paintings, and drawings dating from the 17th century to the present. The show opened with Versailles as a "camp Eden," examining the concept of se camper in the royal courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and traced camp through the figure of the dandy, the queer subcultures of Europe and America, and into contemporary fashion. The exhibition's Met Gala, co-chaired by Lady Gaga, Alessandro Michele, Harry Styles, and Anna Wintour, made camp a global cultural event. Read more at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The 2026 exhibition "Susan Sontag: Seeing and Being Seen" at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, running from June 12 to November 2, 2026, is a reprise and expansion of the 2025 exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn. The Berlin version adds a section exploring Sontag's traces in the city, with recollections from contemporaries including Ulrike Ottinger and Carolin Emcke, and a section dedicated to the influence of Sontag's thinking on queer culture. The exhibition centers on "reflections on visibility, self-presentation, and representation" and Sontag's "acute sensitivity to all forms of discrimination and exclusion" as a queer Jewish woman.
Sontag was a novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and one of the most influential public intellectuals of the 20th century. "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964) was her breakthrough essay, published when she was 31. She went on to write On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). The 2017 volume Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marked 50 years of writing on camp since the essay, with essays on camp icons, stylistic periods, and representative texts from television, film, and literature. Read more at Rowman and Littlefield.
Wilde is the pre-Sontag camp archetype. His plays (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895), his novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890), and his public persona all embody the camp sensibility: wit, paradox, artificiality, and the deliberate subversion of seriousness. Sontag cited Wilde as a camp precursor, noting that camp "is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness."
Warhol's work is saturated with camp. His Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) transform a mass-produced commercial product into an art object through an act of aesthetic recontextualization that is fundamentally camp. His films, including Heat (1972) and Bad (1977), deliberately court the "so bad it's good" territory that Sontag identified as camp. Warhol's persona, with its silver wigs and deadpan pronouncements, was itself a camp performance.
Waters's films, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and Hairspray (1988), are among the most deliberately camp works in American cinema. Waters celebrates bad taste with such conviction and specificity that it becomes its own aesthetic. His affection for the grotesque, the excessive, and the theatrical is pure camp: not mockery but genuine love for the artificial and the extreme.
Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) are camp in their deliberate artificiality. Sherman poses as imaginary female characters from B-movies, using costume, makeup, and lighting to create images that are both parody and homage. The series embodies Sontag's observation that camp "is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon."
Camp is a way of seeing, not a property of objects. The same object can be seen camply or not camply. A Baroque church is not inherently camp. But when you look at it and notice the excess of gold, the cherubs cascading from every surface, the theatricality of the space, and you appreciate it not for its religious function but for its sheer audacity, you are seeing it camply.
Sontag provided a useful test: "Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content.'" If you are looking at something and your primary pleasure is in its style rather than its content, in how it was made rather than what it says, you are in camp territory. If the object is deliberately exaggerated, theatrical, or artificial, and it knows it, you are definitely there.
The 2025 article in Doing History in Public notes that camp "is everything and its opposite" and that "in the definition by Sontag, Art Nouveau objects turn, and this is typical, one thing into something else." This elusiveness is part of camp's nature. It resists fixed definition because it is a sensibility, not a rule.
Camp is closely related to kitsch, another aesthetic category involving lowbrow culture, though camp appreciates kitsch ironically while kitsch is produced without irony. The 2026 call for papers on kitsch notes that "the concept of 'camp,' too, with its emphasis on surface, theatricality, and seriousness, proves a relevant reference point." Camp connects to Pop Art, which shared camp's interest in mass culture and artificiality, and to Art Nouveau, which Sontag identified as a proto-camp movement. It relates to postmodernism, which rejected the high/low culture divide that camp had been quietly eroding for decades. For broader context, read our blog post on what makes art art.
Camp is best experienced in performance and fashion rather than in traditional museum galleries, though the 2019 Met exhibition demonstrated that it can be effectively staged in an institutional setting. For the Sontag connection, the 2026 exhibition "Susan Sontag: Seeing and Being Seen" at the Schwules Museum in Berlin (June 12 to November 2, 2026) is the most direct way to engage with the intellectual history of camp.
For camp in visual art, the Museum of Modern Art holds Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and Sherman's Untitled Film Stills. For camp in performance, drag shows remain the most direct living expression of the camp sensibility. RuPaul's Drag Race, which has been on television since 2009, has brought camp aesthetics to a global audience, though the question of whether mass-mediated camp can still be camp is itself a camp question. For camp in cinema, the films of John Waters, especially Pink Flamingos (1972), are essential viewing.
If you want to understand camp, read Sontag's essay first. It is short, numbered, and deliberately fragmentary, and it remains the best introduction to the sensibility. Then go to a drag show, watch a John Waters film, or visit the Schwules Museum exhibition in Berlin. You will recognize camp when you see it, and the recognition itself is part of the point. Camp is a private code that became public, and the fact that it survived the transition tells you something about its power. For more, read our entries on kitsch and Pop Art, or explore our post on what makes art art.
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