Kitsch Camp

It is far better to be considered Camp than Kitsch; this is what I have discovered so far. I did some digging on Wikipedia and also read two essays: Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp and Roger Scruton’s Kitsch and the Modern Predicament. First, the Wikipedia definitions:

Camp: "an aesthetic in which something has appeal because of its bad taste or ironic value."

Kitsch: "art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious to the point of being in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass."

And here is how Wikipedia delineates between the two:
"Camp versus Kitsch: Much like the closely related notion of kitsch, camp has traditionally been viewed as hard to define. The terms '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 object proper, whereas 'camp' is a mode of performance. Thus, a person may consume kitsch intentionally or unintentionally. Camp, however, as Susan Sontag observed, is always a way of consuming or performing culture 'in quotation marks.'"

So, Kitsch refers to an object, whereas Camp refers more to a mode of performance. It is also clear, by reading Sontag's and Scruton's essays, that it's much better to be considered Camp than Kitsch. From Sontag:

"Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'a camp,' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling."

And from Scruton:

"Kitsch is omnipresent, part of the language, and a seemingly inevitable aspect of cultural democracy. It is the debased coinage of the emotions. Kitsch is advertising, just as most advertising is Kitsch. It is an attempt to turn value into price, the problem being that its subject matter has a value only when it is not pretended and a price only when it is. Hence the market in emotion must deal in simulated goods."

Camp and Kitsch both deal with the sentimental, but while the former embraces it as "so bad that it's good," the latter is seen as purely pretentious, empty, and cliche. John Waters of Hairspray and Pecker fame truly loves the tackiness, the Camp, of things. People who watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 do so because the films they show transcend "bad" and become more entertaining than some "good" movies out there. People who deal in Camp find true enjoyment in it. Kitsch, however, often has less luck in finding people that are sympathetic to its qualities.

Roger Scruton, a British philosopher, proposes that Kitsch actually came about because of the Enlightenment and people's loss of faith: "Faith exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion, our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life, the life lived in judgment. When faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily be captured and put on sale. Some things—the human heart is one of them—can be bought and sold only if they are first denatured. The Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be: hence the emotion that they offer is fake."

A Kitsch object has an empty, or expired, value. Scruton references critic Clement Greenberg in his essay, stating how Greenberg was crucial in moving the art world towards abstraction, Modernism, in the 1930s by proposing that realism had become cliche and empty - in effect, Kitsch. Scruton, writing in 1999, updates this theory with his assertion that Post-Modernism is actually "Preemptive Kitsch." When the avant-garde abstract paintings of the first half of the 20th century began being copied and pasted on the walls of corporation boardrooms and assimilated into advertising, the Post-Modernists either took quick steps to try to prevent their work from ending up in the same category, or they created work that was "intentionally" Kitsch. Some artists that fit the latter category include Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Damien Hirst. As Scruton puts it, "The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. (The intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like the intention to act unintentionally.) Preemptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. The dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch or "kitsch." The quotation marks function like the forceps with which a pathologist lifts some odoriferous specimen from its jar."

As you can see, there's no real love for true Kitsch, as there is for true Camp. Which brings me to my work. There were a few people at AIB, just a few, who seemed concerned that my mannequin tintypes were leaning towards the category of Kitsch, and it's something that Jesseca mentioned during our phone conversation (although we were both a little unsure of its exact definition, hence the spark for this overlong blog post). As sometimes happens, I can sort of see both sides of this argument. Here's why:

• I'm using an artistic (or photographic) process that is no longer in use. It is outdated.
• I am intending to make an ironic comment on photography and the Western belief that photographs contain truth and can enhance memory.
• I'm working more in the spirit of a folk artist than a fine artist, at least in my use of process and materials.

If I was forced to put my work into one or both categories of Camp and Kitsch, I could deal with Camp. I have a bit of a camp-y personality anyway. I enjoy and have a fascination with things that are "so bad they're good." I watch Mystery Science Theater 3000. I used to very proudly drive a Geo Metro and brag about it. I dig the band Journey. And I do like the fact that tintype photographers in the 1800s were "bottom of the barrel" street vendors.

However, I do not create "junk" and display it in a gallery simply for irony's sake, and I'm not creating work that tries to "legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it," as Scruton puts it. In other words, I'm not trying to make "preemptive kitsch." Further, I don't feel that the tintypes I'm making are an "inferior copy of an existing style," though others may disagree (I was a bit disheartened when I bought the instructional DVD by John Coffer on how to make tintypes, and he stated that the "modern tintype" kits would not allow an artist to create High Art, that only the traditional way, his way, would be deemed as such). I'm not trying to be sentimental, especially for sentimentality's sake, and I sure hope that my art isn't "pretentious to the point of being in bad taste," as Wikipedia puts it.

I intend for my tintypes to remind viewers of the art of the 19th century and the sentimentality that existed there, but my hope is that their thoughts don't stop there. I want to connect the subject matter to more modern concepts, some of which I mentioned in my thought paper this month. As such, I intend to do more than just repeat conventions and formulas of the past.