Hipsterdom as Camp

I’ve just reread Susan Sontag’s famous essay, “Notes on Camp,” for the first time in several years. If she were still around, I’d like to know her thoughts on how hipsterdom fits in to the Camp cosmos. As she puts it, Camp “incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.” When one thinks of the prototypical hipster, it is the repudiation of high-mindedness (by an agile intelligence), image over philosophy, and an anti-politicality that come to mind.

“Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality,” says Sontag. This goes a long way in explaining why, of all the art forms, hipsters favor music. Since “style is everything,” they turn to music, the most style-dominated of the arts. In literature and in visual art, it is more difficult to completely subvert the non-stylistic elements of the work (the words must convey some meaning, the painting must represent something). But with music, the main thing is the sound, which does not mean or convey anything at all. Style is something largely ineffable, as is melody.

Also, with their great crutch – irony (as defined by them, not the dictionary) – hipsters level any attempt at seriousness, morality, or caring. These are the commandments of Camp, too.

Where other types of Camp embrace exaggerated style in the form of glamorous dress, elaborate (read: bright, ostentatious) décor, and melodramatic art, hipsterdom takes exaggerated style to a different extreme. It still involves people making themselves into something they are not, but in this case it is the upper or upper-middle class person remaking him or herself as blue collar (the trucker hats, the bad t-shirts, the mullets). Depending on your chosen perspective, this could be either an indictment of upper-middle class values, or an elitist jab at the less educated and less wealthy. Unfortunately, I think hipsters themselves often don’t know which it is.

It seems, then, that hipsterdom is a sub-genre of Camp, and perhaps the variation of it that takes it to its least attractive extreme.