Palette Palate

Amy Yasmine reflects on American writer Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes On Camp’, whose narrative as it turns out, is exactly what fashion needs right now.

- Susan Sontag

Taste. Perhaps the most subjective word in the English dictionary, for one man’s meat could easily be another man’s poison. In an artistic sense, consider controversial Damien Hirst’s work-frame as an example: his 2013 exhibition at the Tate Modern garnered polarised reviews, as noted by The Telegraph: “The room containing the butterflies was offensive, showing an arrogant assumption that the artist is entitled to abuse and destroy living creatures,” said a critique, while another praised Hirst’s grasp of conceptualism, “transforming London from an artistic backwater in a beacon of the avant-garde. For this alone, he earned himself a place among our greats.”

Indeed, this polarised breadth of “taste” is what compelled American writer Susan Sontag to pen her 1964 essay ‘Notes On Camp’, in which she outlined its foundations. To her, “Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.” Like a harmonious pairing of steak and 1787 Château Lafite, or a woman in an evening dress at a red carpet event.