The difference between camp and campy

J. Bryan Lowder blames Susan Sontag for the misperception:

A key problem (probably the key problem) with camp: Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” was wildly influential. So influential, in fact, that even if you haven’t read it, those 58 little fragments have infected your mind as part of a larger cultural epidemic. You’ve picked them up on your fingers while leafing through the endless trove of film reviews, television recaps, “think pieces,” and newspaper articles contagious with throwaway lines like “campy performance” and “camp appeal.” You’ve heard that Pink Flamingos or American Horror Story or Lady Gaga is “campy,” inferred that the word must indicate a certain feral, transgressive, winking decadence, and caught Sontag’s nasty little bug.  ...

Unfortunately, the majority of “Notes on Camp”—past the part where Sontag rightly defines camp as “one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon”—is actually concerned with what I’ll distinguish as campiness or the campy. Campiness, as a style and sensibility, comprises a set of widely appreciated characteristics: frivolity, the celebration of the “so bad it’s good,” the overwrought, the histrionic, what Sontag calls “failed seriousness.” It’s standard midnight-screening fare. But these characteristics are not at all intrinsic to camp. In other words, camp is not the same thing as campy, and the latter, as a popular aesthetic, may well be fading into obscurity while the former, a “way of seeing the world,” soldiers on.