“Camp” at the Metropolitan Museum: Susan Sontag as Metaphor

The sound of typewriter clicks permeates “Camp: Notes on Fashion” the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute’s extravaganza exhibition, relieved only by a recording of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz. The MET gala, its yearly benefit this week, may only exist as a distraction from all that the “Camp” show shows, with un-wearable art on celebrities devised to do and outdo the “camp” theme, dressing up itself as camp. But the exhibition, taken from Susan Sontag, the twentieth century diva of cultural dialogues, is a cerebral tour de force.

Susan Sontag was glamorous in her day, with a white swath over raven hair. An intellectual’s intellectual, famously bisexual, this New Yorker epitomized smarts in so many ways, she made it cool to consider pop as high culture. Which makes the MET’s homage possible, and a plausible riff on her essay, “Notes on Camp,” and something of a stroke of genius. Tracing an idea back centuries and also invoking Christopher Isherwood as muse, the exhibition looks at Aubrey Beardsley’s 1896 illustration for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Paul Cadmus’ paintings featuring phalluses, as well as a recent Moschino frock adorned with plastic butterflies. It’s designer Jeremy Scott’s take on an original Moschino, and sums up the theme, saying much about fashion’s wit, humor, sex, and subversion. Well, that’s camp.

The press opening, its own yearly fashion send-up, provides a venue for the inventive and provocative. Stephen Jones, the exhibition’s hat designer, looked dapper carrying a duck bag. In real life, make of it what you will. As Susan Sontag wrote, “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.