Posted on 05/08/2019 8:38:13 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
This week, the Met Gala took place in New York City. The event has always been a showpiece for celebrities seeking to make a splash, from Rihanna in her Pope costume to Katy Perry dressed as a chandelier.
This year’s event was designed in homage to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” According to Sontag, “camp” is the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
In reality, camp according to Sontag is something else: a deliberate attempt to tear down boundaries.
“Camp taste,” Sontag wrote, “turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.” “[H]igh culture,” Sontag acknowledged, “is basically moral.” Camp, by contrast, “is wholly aesthetic.” In fact, it “incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.” It represents the “solvent of morality” and “neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”
As Kareem Khubchandani, performance studies and queer studies professor at Tufts University, told NBC News, camp “makes profane the things that are sacred.” Sontag said something similar in her essay: Camp is a “sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous.”
There is something inherently insulting about camp—particularly camp exhibited to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of dollars by ersatz socialists who consider themselves the moral superiors of those who live in flyover country.
Watching celebrities preen on the red carpet while dressed as stripper Mary Poppins (Lady Gaga) or a Cleopatra knockoff complete with shirtless slaves (Billy Porter) is inherently irritating. There’s something sneering and preening about it. But if you’re irritated, then you just don’t “get it.” You don’t understand the “irony.” You’re too sincere, which makes you a bore.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysignal.com ...
#BoycottHollywood
PING!
Suddenly the oceans rising almost seems a moral imperative to ensure it occurs.
‘Roma’ parties while the Republic disintegrates.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.