Queer Art of Failure: Notes on Camp and the 2019 Met Gala

Last night, the baddest bitches went to the Metropolitan art museum in their baddest bitch clothes. This year’s Met Gala was arranged by Anna Wintour and was hosted by Lady Gaga, Serena Williams, and Harry Styles. Lena Waithe also sat on the planning committee.

As a whole, people didn’t read the essay and had no clue what “camp” was. There were lots of earnest trials and failures, however, and I think that’s the embodiment of camp! Straight people failing at camp is campier than I could’ve hoped for, friends. So overall, I’d say it was a success. Here are my favorite looks paired with my favorite sentences from Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp.”

Also, Ciara and Big Freedia did…this together. It’s so campy I could quote the whole essay under it, so instead, here it is without commentary:

Janelle Monáe

“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.”

Billy Porter

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxIxp8zBW7A/

“So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard — and the most articulate audience — of Camp.”

Lady Gaga

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJQjb_nHsU/

“For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.”

Harry Styles

“To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”

Céline Dion

“That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.”

Katy Perry

“Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.'”

Gigi Hadid

“Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”

Miley Cyrus

“Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp — what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.”

Jared Leto

“The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance.”

Danai Gurira

“Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”

MJ Rodriguez

“One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that “sincerity” is not enough.”

Janet Mock

“Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment.”

Robyn

“Camp is the triumph of the epicene style.”

Natasha Lyonne

“Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated.”

Dominique Jackson

“To camp is a mode of seduction — one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders.”

Yara Shahidi

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJBnd0gg7U/

“Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

Dee Hilfiger

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJEp9tB6rH/

“The Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical.”

Tiffany Haddish

“Camp… makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object.”

Saoirse Ronan

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJAAqKHB4p/

“Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”

Jordan Roth

“It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

Zoe Saldana

“What the Camp eye appreciates is the unity, the force of the person.”

Awkwafina

“Camp is the glorification of ‘character.'”

Whembley Sewell

“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

Caroline Trentini

“Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”

Hamish Bowles

“All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice.”

Regina Hall

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxIz7GQnieP/

“Many examples of Camp are things which, from a “serious” point of view, are either bad art or kitsch.”

Serena Williams

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJA_O3DypY/

“…In their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy – and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.”

Kacey Musgraves

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJCjgUhhT5/

“Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons.”

Tracee Ellis Ross

“Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious.”

Alicia Vikander

“Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal style.”

Emma Stone

“It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.”

Zazie Beetz

“The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility.”

Diane von Furstenberg

“Style is everything.”

Kerry Washington

“There is seriousness in Camp… But there is never, never tragedy.”

Sarah Paulson

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJXQJXjFEI/

“There is a sense in which it is correct to say: “It’s too good to be Camp.” Or “too important,” not marginal enough.”

Kristen Stewart

“Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.”

Lily Collins

https://twitter.com/ohmazerunner/status/1125561095207444480

“[Camp]…is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such.”

Jennifer Lopez

“Some art which can be approached as Camp… merits the most serious admiration and study.”

Dua Lipa

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxJYnOynFay/

“Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.”

Ciara

“Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.”

Hailee Steinfeld

“Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.”

Cardi B

“Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is usually less satisfying.”

Rupaul

“If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.”

Solange

“The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity.”

Cara Delevingne

“Camp proposes a comic vision of the world.”

Ezra Miller

“Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying.”

Michael Urie

“[Camp] is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not.”

Lena Waithe

“The relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.”

Zendaya

“So many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé.”

Tessa Thompson

“But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.”

Lala Anthony

“Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility.

Lizzo

“Camp is a tender feeling.”

Bette Midler

“Things are campy, not when they become old – but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt”

Lupita Nyong’o

“Successful Camp… even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.”

Indya Moore

“…The Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken.”

Hari Nef

“And Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”