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Britain by the virtuosi who were aristocratic antiquarians and ‘curious men’,
collectors of rarities and connoisseurs (King 1994: 32–3). The bourgeoisie,
rejecting aristocratic legitimacy, as well as Roman Catholicism, read this
performance of self as deceptive and superficial. Against it, they set a different
model of selfhood which emphasized interiority and content. The bourgeois
self was expressed in modest, pious conduct and dress (King 1994: 26–7). An
emphasis on surface appearances suggested economic risk, a lack of social
usefulness, and the sexual non-productivity and excess of sodomy. Certain
gestures and forms of deportment, as well as the curious and ornate objects
of aristocratic collectors, all become signifiers of suspect sexuality and of an
empty subjectivity.
By the mid-eighteenth century in Britain the poise and mannered posture
of ‘fribbles’ was thought to reveal them as ‘sodomites’ and represented ‘the
absence of subjectivity (conscience, sincerity, identity, utility, sensibility) once
assigned by the bourgeoisie to the aristocrats as a class’ (King 1994: 40).
Sodomy had been ‘aristocratized’, so that aristocratic mannerisms and prac-
tices could be appropriated by members of other social classes as a form of
homosexual identity, or at least, a means of ‘un-identifying’ with dominant
models of selfhood (King 1994: 40–1). The practice of collecting ornamental,
decorative and ornate objects becomes part of that construction of identity.
In 1964, in her ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag described ‘an improvised self-
elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of
taste’ (Sontag 1966). King’s essay is partly a response to and critique of this
influential text’s rather apolitical understanding of camp. Camp was described
by Sontag as a ‘sensibility’, a taste cultivated by homosexual men, for certain
kinds of things such as Tiffany lamps. The problem with this argument is that
camp becomes a set of stylistic traits that just happen to be associated with
male homosexuality rather than, as King and others have suggested, an oppos-
itional model of selfhood which rejects dominant notions of authenticity and
masculine subjectivity. King argues that ‘taste’ developed as a response to ‘the
excessive performances of the self that we might call Camp today’ (1994: 36).
Taste was about the development of a facility for moral and normative judge-
ment, about the alignment of ‘manners and morals’, about decorum and the
correcting of excess. Taste is public and social: the virtuosi, on the other hand,
were perceived as asocial and narcissistic (King 1994: 35–6). The relationship
between the virtuoso collector and the objects he collected was not understood
in terms of taste and judgement but in terms of a mutual social uselessness,
superficiality and superfluity. Collected objects were ‘knacks’ or ‘knick-knacks’,
a term which could encompass trinkets and ornaments, tricks, toys, objects
with low use-value and curiosities. A knack could also signify dextrous ability,
as it does today, while knackers meant both testicles and castanets, linking the