What is ‘camp’? This year’s Met Gala theme.

At the Met Gala on Monday evening, “camp” will be on display. But what exactly is camp? It’s a question many are asking but few can answer.

When the curators and co-chairs (who this year include Lady Gaga and Harry Styles) chose the theme for this year’s annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, they decided to call it: “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” a play on writer Susan Sontag’s seminal essay, “Notes on Camp.”

In 1964, Sontag tried to make sense of the notoriously hard-to-define aesthetic in her bullet-pointed treatise by saying camp is the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”Camp and .Campy; Being so extreme that it has an amusing and sometimes perversely sophisticated appeal. Over the top and farcical, intentionally exaggerated so as not to be taken seriously. Found primarily in television, theatre and motion pictures, camp endeavors for satire and, for those who fully understand and appreciate the risible nature of its material, it’s not surprising when it develops a cult following.Both ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’ and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ are movies widely considered very campy.