David Given Schwarm

I am strongly drawn to camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it’ he can only, whatever his intention exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw it contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Though I am speaking about sensibility only – and about sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous – these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotions – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.