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Library Displays & Exhibits

Fall 2023: Notes on Barbie

Notes on Barbie

The Fall 2023 display at the Lorenzo A. Ramirez Library, Notes on Barbie, invites viewers to consider:

  • The ubiquity of dolls throughout history and cultures, via images from the British Museum uploaded to the promotional meme generator at https://www.barbieselfie.ai/
  • How Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964) prefigured the camp splendor of Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023), and how both of these capture the experience of playing with Barbies

Display Images

Barbie Memes

Notes on Camp

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. --Susan Sontag, "Notes On 'Camp'" (1964)

More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious". One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. --Susan Sontag, "Notes On 'Camp'" (1964)

Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. --Susan Sontag, "Notes On 'Camp'" (1964)

Camp makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica. --Susan Sontag, "Notes On 'Camp'" (1964)

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style... the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things being-what-they-are-not. --Susan Sontag, "Notes On 'Camp'" (1964)

Behind the "straight" public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing. --Susan Sontag, "Notes On 'Camp'" (1964)

To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role... life as theater. --Susan Sontag, "Notes On 'Camp'" (1964)

Books & Media

Credits

Display items contributed by Jazman Blount, Bexley Daugherty, Erin Fletcher, Juniper Singley, Barbara Sproat, and Violet Voelcker.

Curated by Erin Fletcher.