Tonight is the big annual Met Gala, where celebrities and all the glamorous beautiful people converge to celebrate how famous and glamorous and beautiful they all are. In actuality it's a big fundraiser as well as a celebration of the museum's next big fashion show.
This year, the theme for the gala and the new exhibition is "camp" (the famous phrase coined by Susan Sontag in her legendary 1964 essay Notes on Camp), culture that revels in the love of the artificial, the tacky, the sleazy, the intentionally bad and offensive, the kitchy, the dumb. Sontag writes about how, in camp, "everything is in quotation marks."
For example: John Waters movies are homosexual camp. Russ Meyers movies are straight camp. Michael Moore is liberal camp. Sarah Palin is conservative camp.
You get the idea.
This Met Gala has to be the first big fashion event based on an intellectual essay. In many ways, it's appropriate that stuff that is or was once upon a time considered low art and sleazy is now being celebrated in the most prestigious and glittering museum in the world.
I feel bad that Susan Sontag won't be able to attend the gala -- she's been dead since 2004 -- although some are saying she'd hate it. This "campy" gala and exhibit are, in many ways, a prime example of cultural appropriation, where the rich and famous and powerful adapt and glamorize and, in some ways, condescend to and patronize, the auspices of the poor (like old school European peasant food being fancied up and served in expensive restaurants) But what a tribute and honor this is to her legacy!
By the way, if the Met ever wants to appropriate anything from this blog and make a gala out of it, please, be my guest! Just do it in my lifetime so I can attend!
For example: John Waters movies are homosexual camp. Russ Meyers movies are straight camp. Michael Moore is liberal camp. Sarah Palin is conservative camp.
You get the idea.
This Met Gala has to be the first big fashion event based on an intellectual essay. In many ways, it's appropriate that stuff that is or was once upon a time considered low art and sleazy is now being celebrated in the most prestigious and glittering museum in the world.
I feel bad that Susan Sontag won't be able to attend the gala -- she's been dead since 2004 -- although some are saying she'd hate it. This "campy" gala and exhibit are, in many ways, a prime example of cultural appropriation, where the rich and famous and powerful adapt and glamorize and, in some ways, condescend to and patronize, the auspices of the poor (like old school European peasant food being fancied up and served in expensive restaurants) But what a tribute and honor this is to her legacy!
By the way, if the Met ever wants to appropriate anything from this blog and make a gala out of it, please, be my guest! Just do it in my lifetime so I can attend!
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