Extravagance
Related: eccentric - exaggeration - excessive - extraordinary - hedonism - non-mainstream
The increasing extravagance of popular entertainment in Ancient Rome was exemplified by the inauguration of the Colloseum under the emperor Titus. Dio Cassius said that 9,000 wild animals were killed in the one hundred days of celebration which inaugurated the amphitheatre opening. Shown here is Pollice Verso (1872) by Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Definition
# The quality of being extravagant.# Immoderate expense or display.
# Something extravagant. --AHD
Camp [...]
25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance.Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.
Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l'oeil insects and cracks in the masonry.
Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg's six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman. . . .
In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself.
Gaudí's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal - most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia - the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp
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