Distinguishing Between Kitsch and Camp
The words "camp" and "kitsch" are often used interchangeably; both may relate to art, literature, music, or any object that carries an aesthetic value. However, "kitsch" refers specifically to the work itself, whereas "camp" is a mode of performance. Thus, a person may consume kitsch intentionally or unintentionally. Camp, as Susan Sontag observed, is always a way of consuming or performing culture "in quotation marks."
However, Sontag also distinguishes the difference between "naive" and "deliberate" camp. Kitsch, as a form or style, certainly falls under the category "naive camp" as it is unaware that it is tasteless; "deliberate camp," on the other hand, can be seen as a subversive form of kitsch which deliberately exploits the whole notions of what it is to be kitsch. (Sontag, 1964)
Read more about this topic: Camp (style)
Famous quotes containing the words kitsch and/or camp:
“Ultimately Warhol’s private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“Usually the scenery about them is drear and savage enough; and the logger’s camp is as completely in the woods as a fungus at the foot of a pine in a swamp; no outlook but to the sky overhead; no more clearing than is made by cutting down the trees of which it is built, and those which are necessary for fuel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)