The Cocktail Party Effect

Entrance to the exhibit The theme of this year’s MET Gala was ‘camp,’ prompting celebrities to dress in outrageous outfits. At the time of the event’s photos overwhelming my Instagram feed, I had largely dismissed camp as something to be appreciated only by teenagers abusing a Snapchat filter. Personally, camp just seemed unsophisticated and, well, weird. However, the Camp: Notes of Fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed me the nuances of camp revealing a complex and elusive concept.   Presentation Camp is an attitude of sorts well captured by its French origin se camper which means ‘to flaunt’ or ‘to posture;’ camp is not one thing, but rather a complicated and calculated art of presentation.  Large parts of camp are related to how one stands to create an ideal form or ‘beau ideal’ such as contrapposto—standing in a way in which the arms and shoulders balance out the hips and legs—and often having an arm akimbo—hands on one’s hips wi...

   The Ten Largest (1907) Hilma af Klint Even though the exhibit “Paintings for the Future” featuring Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s work at the Guggenheim Museum ended this past winter, “The Ten Largest” series (featured above) has stuck with me. The ten pieces are labeled and thus ordered as a human life cycle beginning with childhood, going to youth, adulthood, and eventually old age. I believe examining the passing stages of one’s life is a universal concept, one to which people of all walks of life can relate. By engaging with this grandiose topic, af Klint’s “The Ten Largest” already has a heightened sense of importance in this exhibit. However, in addition to taking on such an ambitious topic, I think there is another layer to af Klint’s work as it transcends mediums as well. The design can be connected with the short story “Masque of the Red Death” by American writer Edgar Allen Poe . To my mind, a universal concept repeated with the same kind of imag...