Vocal Accords

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it was summarily booted from one of the world’s greatest—or worst, depending on your taste—pop-culture celebrations: Eurovision. When Israel launched its genocidal campaign in Gaza, it was allowed to keep competing. And it’s done very well. Lisa Dorst goes into the pulsing belly of the gaudy Eurovision beast to interrogate the competition’s politics:

One word that comes up a lot in attempts to describe the Eurovision aesthetic is “camp.” In a blog post for the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan pronounced that Eurovision 2009 was “the biggest, campest carnival yet.” The following year, Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, characterized the contest by its “reliable deployment of camp, whether sly or unwitting.” I’d brushed up on my Sontag before heading to Vienna and thought I’d prepared for artifice, for schlock, for the pileup of off-kilter theatricality and post-disco schmaltz that inspired Carl Wilson, in Let’s Talk About Love, to label Eurovision the “Cheeseball Olympics.”

But as the hook to “Ferto” lodged itself further in my head and Eurovision’s physical presence continued to intrude, it was becoming harder to see all this as properly winking, witty, and “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical,” as Sontag puts it in her second Note on Camp. What was emanating from the Stadthalle seemed closer to “kitsch,” that nice German loanword for camp without wit. Kitsch is politicized and shaped by residual history; its precondition, Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939, is “the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition” whose familiar formulas could be recycled by reactionary regimes toward the aim of mass appeal.