A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1964, Time magazine published a review of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” calling her “one of Manhattan’s brightest intellectuals.”

“Indeed, decadence has enjoyed a considerable afterlife in that over-the-top culture known as camp, which the critic Susan Sontag helpfully clarified as an ability to discriminate between inferior art and deliberately inferior art—‘the good taste of bad taste.’

That definition of camp should not be taken as a definition of decadence, although the camp sensibility does demonstrate the conflicted attitude toward modernity that we have identified with decadence. Our initial attempt to define decadence was etymological and historical, and that effort remains meaningful. But decadence is more than decline, decay, and degeneration, whether artistic, historical, or social. We need to keep those meanings in mind, certainly, while also keeping in mind a number of nuances and implications. Think of decadence as an ornate, highly artificial object that resembles nothing in nature, represented on a slide projected through an old-fashioned magic lantern, seen through a series of colored filters, each color representing a different aspect of decadence. The object, in other words, takes on a different coloration depending on the filter. One filter darkens the object and makes decadence look like pessimism; another gives it a luscious hue that makes it look like hedonism; a mottled, greenish filter turns the object rotten, suggesting degeneration; still another imparts a lavender glow and connotes, somehow, “the love that dare not speak its name” (the phrase Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, used to describe homosexuality). But whatever coloration decadence takes, it is typically the expression—the projection—of urban experience.” — From ‘Decadence: A Very Short Introduction’ by David Weir

[Pg. 8 — From ‘Decadence: A Very Short Introduction’ by David Weir.]

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