#seriousness

The serious man [...] accords an absolute meaning to the epithet *useful*, which, in truth, has no more meaning if taken by itself than the words high, low, right, and left. [...] For the military man, the army is useful; for the colonial administrator, the highway; for the serious revolutionary, the revolution — army, highway, revolution, productions becoming inhuman idols to which one will not hesitate to sacrifice man himself. Therefore, the serious man is dangerous. It is natural that he makes himself a tyrant. Dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him; and by the same token he also ignores the value of the subjectivity and the freedom of others, to such an extent that, sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself that what he sacrifices is nothing.

Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary “avant-garde” art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.

I use humor because I think it’s one of the more effective ways of communicating the truth. A lot of times truth-telling can be kind of preachy or didactic or self-righteous and it turns people off. And it’s just not effective. But humor just activates everything. It just makes it more enjoyable, more accessible. It’s something I kind of had to find out the hard way, through trial and error. For years I thought of myself as very serious. I wanted to be a very serious, deep artist, as all young people do. But then when I really examined it, and told the truth about myself, I found that humor was something I just kind of instinctively went toward. That word comes up a lot with me—instinctive. It’s what I follow. I follow instincts instead of intellectual ideas. I really don’t think the artist is an intellectual. I believe that the artist is a set of nerves, nerve endings. That’s what an artist is.