The Cult of Quirk
A friend sent me this article, asking what I thought, because she was torn between hating it and loving it.
Excerpt:
As an aesthetic principle, quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords, the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously... Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt.
This is what I wrote my friend who had sent me the link:
Yeah, I dunno. Some of his critique is valid, but some of it seems way off. I’ll give him quirk as a dominant aesthetic for our generation, but to say we invented it-Sherlock Holmes was quirky, yo. Every comic-book superhero or villain was essentially nothing but a collection of nonsequitor quirks.
Also, hating on Glass and TAL is the new hating on The White Stripes. (And I really can’t stand it when people give away the endings of movies, just because they’ve decided that you really OUGHT to have seen it by now.) Anyway, I heard the radio version of the cloned bull story, and at least in that version, they don’t make it sound like the guy has learned an important lesson at the end-it’s very clear that he’s still living in a fantasy world where his dead buddy will come back to life. I haven’t seen the TV show, but the radio show has had some of the most interesting and deeply personal reporting to come out of Iraq and Afghanistan that I have encountered-Hirschorn is guilty of a certain amount of editing to fit his theory, too.
But he’s right that Wes Anderson has descended into preciousness as he’s allowed quirk to overtake substance in some of his films (though I did still love both Tannenbaums and Zissou). He’s right that quirk is becoming overused by some. But this has always been the case. The first Dali absurdist paintings were shocking and transgressive; by the end, his style was stale. Every aesthetic eventually becomes a mockery of itself, as the people who originally developed it either lose control of its use or allow themselves to be swallowed whole by it. Then comes the reaction, and so the next aesthetic movement is born. From the voluptuous curves of Art Nouveau come the straight-lined minimalism of Art Deco, and
And I should probably get back to work, huh? Bottom line: I’d rather reek of quirk than of patchouli.
Opinions?
Excerpt:
As an aesthetic principle, quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords, the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously... Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt.
This is what I wrote my friend who had sent me the link:
Yeah, I dunno. Some of his critique is valid, but some of it seems way off. I’ll give him quirk as a dominant aesthetic for our generation, but to say we invented it-Sherlock Holmes was quirky, yo. Every comic-book superhero or villain was essentially nothing but a collection of nonsequitor quirks.
Also, hating on Glass and TAL is the new hating on The White Stripes. (And I really can’t stand it when people give away the endings of movies, just because they’ve decided that you really OUGHT to have seen it by now.) Anyway, I heard the radio version of the cloned bull story, and at least in that version, they don’t make it sound like the guy has learned an important lesson at the end-it’s very clear that he’s still living in a fantasy world where his dead buddy will come back to life. I haven’t seen the TV show, but the radio show has had some of the most interesting and deeply personal reporting to come out of Iraq and Afghanistan that I have encountered-Hirschorn is guilty of a certain amount of editing to fit his theory, too.
But he’s right that Wes Anderson has descended into preciousness as he’s allowed quirk to overtake substance in some of his films (though I did still love both Tannenbaums and Zissou). He’s right that quirk is becoming overused by some. But this has always been the case. The first Dali absurdist paintings were shocking and transgressive; by the end, his style was stale. Every aesthetic eventually becomes a mockery of itself, as the people who originally developed it either lose control of its use or allow themselves to be swallowed whole by it. Then comes the reaction, and so the next aesthetic movement is born. From the voluptuous curves of Art Nouveau come the straight-lined minimalism of Art Deco, and
And I should probably get back to work, huh? Bottom line: I’d rather reek of quirk than of patchouli.
Opinions?