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https://opensea.io/collection/books-39
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July
@july
I just finished this book (believe it or not in a “In and out” parking lot on the way to LA which somehow seems fitting. I just stood there because I was almost done and read the entirety of Notes on “Camp” in one go) A Review: A lot of good essays. On Style. notes on “camp” come to mind. I’ll focus on those. Great overview of art and how it came into being in the backdrop of the 1960s in New York. In many ways, trends of where art was going at the time and where technology was going and moving towards seems generally contemporary and could be words that I read in a blog post somewhere. Of course there are some ideas that are outdated but overall my feeling about how art is perceived and created doesn’t feel like it’s significantly changed in the past 50 years. If anything artists creators writers etc. in a modern setting have been struggling to find meaning in an increasingly complex and difficult age of mechanical reproduction hard. It also highlights Susan Sontag’s ambition or at least desire to create something interesting and lasting as she had just arrived in NYC with something to prove just as the 60s was happening.
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July
@july
Maybe this should go without saying but she does bright really well. It’s not necessarily how I would write but I think reading writers like her you quickly realize how difficult it is to really riff on a theme and come up with so many things to say and then be able to string them together in a way that is unique stylistically. Maybe unique is not the right word, maybe idiosyncratic. And then on top of that the content has to have a position that is interesting and unique and gets the point across. Reading her essays you get a sense of achievement, striving for some level of writing that she’s aspiring to and I find that fascinating. Notes on camp, is definitely the highlight. It’s such a unique thing to not only write a bunch of bullet points about an idea (which essentially that’s what the essay is) to capture an idea of the zeitgeist so presciently and accurately - that it’s used to refer as the etymology of a term that previously didn’t exist before. That’s pretty magical
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David T Phung ⚛️⚡️🚀
@davidtphung
safe travels- let me know if you’re down for tacos on me :)
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qt
@qt
Curious how you think about ‘not real art’ gatekeeping, especially in today's framework with the content/models/tools/etc? Also interested in your perspective on artists’ responsibility for meaning given her commitment to experiencing art rather than excavating it? (Sontag is phenomenal imo. I'm interested in the answers folks have to these questions when they have/have not read her works, so not trying to nitpick or go big brain/exclusionary)
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Eberhard Gil
@azbest
I used to refer to it in high school when I wanted to justify that I'd rather do other things than interpreting poems (together with "it's the 21st century, ma'am, we're long past the Death of the Author")
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