Camp art valorizes bad acting as truer than polished naturalism

Evidence

Jack Smith’s take on stardom was more radical than Warhol’s, as was his deployment of the kindred sensibility known as camp (popularized two years later with Susan Sontag’s first contribution to Partisan Review, “Notes on Camp”). For Smith, the acme of cinematic expressiveness was a series of exotic, juvenile swashbucklers produced at Universal Studios during World War II as vehicles for the Dominican-born actress Maria Montez, who, by conventional standards, can barely be said to be acting at all. … For Smith, Montez’s transparent role-playing, and her unconcealed delight at being the center of attention, were more authentic to him than the naturalism achieved by successfully phony actresses. “A bad actor is rich, unique, idiosyncratic, revealing of himself not of the bad script,” he would write in a follow-up essay, “Belated Appreciation of VS,” published in Film Culture #31, which defended film as a visual medium, using Josef von Sternberg’s films with Marlene Dietrich as his exemplar: Sternberg’s “visual projection—a brilliant transvestite in a world of delirious unreal adventures.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 409

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines camp’s core move via Smith: valuing transparent role-playing over naturalism as more authentic.