What Is Camp? Why My Art Is Deliberately Too Much

Some things are bad on purpose, in a way that makes them better than if they'd tried to be good. That's more or less the whole idea of camp, and it's a much more useful lens for my paintings than most actual art criticism.

What camp actually means

The writer Susan Sontag tried to pin the idea down properly in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, and her short version was that camp loves exaggeration, artifice and theatricality for its own sake. It's the b-movie monster that's clearly a guy in a rubber suit, and loving it anyway, maybe because of that. It's a look so extra that sincerity and irony stop being opposites and just become the same thing. Camp doesn't ask whether something is tasteful. It asks whether something commits.

Trash horror movies are the easiest place to see it: low budgets, high drama, dialogue nobody would defend as good writing, and yet the whole thing works because it never once apologizes for any of that. The moment something camp gets embarrassed about itself, it stops being camp and just becomes bad.

Why my art doesn't apologize either

Ricochet, pictured above, is about as camp as I get on purpose: a unicorn getting hit by an arrow mid-flight, gossiping geese, a friendly octopus, glitter, pizza, all of it turned up several notches past what the actual emotional content of the piece would strictly require. That's not a flaw in the concept. The excess is the point. A quieter version of that same painting would say less, not more, because camp works through volume, not despite it.

Sweet horror runs on the same engine. A smoking gummy bear next to a skull cupcake shouldn't really work as a serious artistic statement, and it doesn't try to. It commits fully to being exactly as much as it is, which is the only rule camp actually has.

More theatrical excess in the shop

Ricochet and the rest of the loudest, most committed pieces live in the hand-signed print collection. If sweet horror as a specific flavor of too much is your thing, my guide to cute creepy art goes deeper into that side of it.

Thank you for taking a unicorn getting shot by an arrow completely seriously as an artistic statement. That's exactly the right response.