Camp (style)

Camp is a social, cultural, and aesthetic style and sensibility based on deliberate and self-acknowledged theatricality. Camp is commonly associated with and attributed to gay male subculture(s), but its basis and practice extends further. Camp aesthetics disrupt many modernists' notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption.

Camp can also be a social practice. For many it is considered a style and performance identity for several types of entertainment including film, cabaret and pantomime. Where high art necessarily incorporates beauty and value, camp necessarily needs to be lively, audacious and dynamic. "Camp aesthetics delights in impertinence." Camp opposes satisfaction and seeks to challenge.

Camp art is related to - and often confused with - kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as "cheesy". When the usage appeared in 1909, it denoted ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, and/or effeminate behavior, and by the middle of the 1970s, the definition comprised: banality, artifice, mediocrity and ostentation so extreme as to have perversely sophisticated appeal. American writer Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on 'Camp' " (1964) emphasized its key elements as: artifice, frivolity, naive middle-class pretentiousness, and 'shocking' excess. Camp as an aesthetic has been popular from the 1960s to the present.