This essay considers the systems of value that undergird the employment of quirky objects in scholarship and argues that quirk historicism is another iteration of modernism in its attachment to estrangement and theatricality as modes of critique. In doing so, the essay asks why it is that “bad art” is so much easier to co-opt into scholarship when it’s safely in the past.

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© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California
2015
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