SETTING UP CAMP

The theme of this year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art [MET] Gala, an annual spectacle of fashion and celebrity was Camp. Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964) was the basis for the exhibition, and Instagram buzzed with excerpts from the text. Sontag emphasised Camp’s critical elements as “failed seriousness” and “outrageous aestheticism”. Of paramount importance is that Camp highlights the difference between artifice and nature.

The MET exhibition itself called , includes a photo of the Victorian “Fanny and Stella”, notorious