Anna Nicole, while alive, paid the price of being part of the world of phenomena while she should really have been a part of the not-real, as she straddled the divide between the myth, the Hollywoodized, gazed-upon, the victim of the voyeuristic fanzine, and a stop along the way of this year's Graveline Tour.
Now that she really is dead, a shimmering rhinestone ghost, there is no cognitive dissonance. She is a construction, an exaggeration, a camp elevation of the notion of romantic transcendence. She is not flesh and blood. At least not any more… Anna Nicole is now what she always was, pure camp. Before, we may have forgotten to maintain our position of being in on the joke with a knowing wink and a nod.
Perhaps it's time for a paradigm shift with respect to camp.
Susan Sontag suggested that for camp to be camp, for drag to be drag, the author (or performer) and the audience have to be complicit in the intentionality of it all. They have to know that they're creating a parody and are exaggerating. It's not camp if it's not on purpose. You have to know you're doing something deliberately exaggerated, and it has to be very tongue-in-cheek. Otherwise, you just have bad taste.
Let's look at a paradigm shift for camp. Let's say that camp is phenomenological. Teleology has nothing to say in this equation. Camp is in the eye of the beholder and "innocent camp" may be almost more a stroke of genius than the intentional mockery of bourgeois striving.
more -- susan smith nash is your guide.Anna Nicole, while alive, paid the price of being part of the world of phenomena while she should really have been a part of the not-real, a...all »Anna Nicole, while alive, paid the price of being part of the world of phenomena while she should really have been a part of the not-real, as she straddled the divide between the myth, the Hollywoodized, gazed-upon, the victim of the voyeuristic fanzine, and a stop along the way of this year's Graveline Tour.
Now that she really is dead, a shimmering rhinestone ghost, there is no cognitive dissonance. She is a construction, an exaggeration, a camp elevation of the notion of romantic transcendence. She is not flesh and blood. At least not any more… Anna Nicole is now what she always was, pure camp. Before, we may have forgotten to maintain our position of being in on the joke with a knowing wink and a nod.
Perhaps it's time for a paradigm shift with respect to camp.
Susan Sontag suggested that for camp to be camp, for drag to be drag, the author (or performer) and the audience have to be complicit in the intentionality of it all. They have to know that they're creating a parody and are exaggerating. It's not camp if it's not on purpose. You have to know you're doing something deliberately exaggerated, and it has to be very tongue-in-cheek. Otherwise, you just have bad taste.
Let's look at a paradigm shift for camp. Let's say that camp is phenomenological. Teleology has nothing to say in this equation. Camp is in the eye of the beholder and "innocent camp" may be almost more a stroke of genius than the intentional mockery of bourgeois striving.
more -- susan smith nash is your guide.«
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