Love Quote by Susan Sontag

Camp, for Sontag, is less a taste than a way of seeing: a refusal to treat style as mere packaging. By calling it a "vision of the world", she elevates camp into an interpretive lens, one that measures meaning in surfaces, gestures, and theatrical excess. The crucial pivot is "but a particular style". Camp is not just aesthetic sensitivity; it is selective devotion to artifice, to things that are too much on purpose (or too much by accident, then rescued by our appreciation). The "love of the exaggerated" isn’t simply about sequins and melodrama. It’s about choosing intensity over authenticity, performance over confession, the wink over the sermon.

The subtext is a quiet revolt against mid-century seriousness - the idea that culture must be sincere to be valuable. Sontag writes from a moment when high/low boundaries were hardening and queer sensibilities were often coded rather than declared. Camp becomes a kind of underground literacy: you recognize the beauty in overstatement because you’ve learned to read irony, to survive by turning constraint into style. Exaggeration functions as both shield and weapon, a way to mock power without staging a direct confrontation.

Context matters: "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964) arrives alongside Pop Art, mass media saturation, and a growing suspicion that "depth" was being sold as moral superiority. Sontag’s brilliance is to argue that exaggeration can be a serious mode of pleasure - not despite its artificiality, but because of it.