The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
When something is just bad, it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish.
Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It’s rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art – like physical beauty in a person – is extremely perishable.
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example – for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.
Love dies because its birth was an error.
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction – as if one were obliged to choose between them...
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.