Intellectual whimsy

Intellectual whimsy is a term typically applied to an approach to culture characterized by absurd juxtapositions, obscure knowledge, and self-mockery. Crossing a broad range of disciplines, the sensibility described as intellectual whimsy is associated with a younger generation of writers, artists, editors and institutional leaders, often inspired by Victorian wit and aesthetics, who infuse cultural education with humor and play. Intellectual whimsy is generally identified by its unique balance of sincerity and ridicule. According to Charlotte Taylor, contributing author to Frieze Magazine, “Whimsy’s affinity with the Victorian bespeaks a hope that culture may regain its bygone influence, but its note of self-parody indicates a defiant readiness to court irrelevance.”
Dada Origins
Intellectual whimsy first emerged as an approach to culture by artists and poets in the Dada movement. Dada artists were interested in how absurd, mundane, and lowbrow elements related to literature, art and philosophy. According to author Charlotte Taylor, intellectual whimsy differs from Dada because the latter relishes absurdity as an end itself and the former “triumphs” when significance is discovered in the “apparently insignificant.”
Publications
Cabinet Magazine is a periodical inspired by the Victorian model of the "well-rounded thinker" addressed to the "intellectually curious reader of the future" using the humor and unexpected relationships.
The Believer is an illustrated American literature periodical published by McSweeny's. Each issue states: "The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. We will focus on writers and books we like. We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt. The working title of this magazine was The Optimist." While Cabinet Magazine covers everything from astronomy to history to art, brand of intellectual whimsy is confined to literature, essays and poetry. In the article in Frieze Magazine, Charlotte Taylor wrote, "Part of the pleasure of reading the magazine, the gesture suggests, is to watch the emergence of unexpected relations among apparently unrelated things.
Art and Institutions
In 2004, Mark Allen founded the non profit arts organization Machine Project in Los Angeles. Machine Project is committed to encouraging “heroic experiments of the gracefully overambitious.” Machine Project combines artist exhibitions in their storefront space with multi-disciplinary lectures, musical performances and unusual workshops, including instruction on machine sewing, soldering, and how to build your own arcade game. Often juxtaposing intellectual and cultural traditions, one event combined the “pop dialectics of the computer as a means of cultural technology in capitalist society" with a Setar musical performance.
In 2004, in Lakewood, Colorado, Adam Lerner founded The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, an art institution that described itself as “part art museum, part public forum, wholly mackerel.” most popular program was the lecture series Mixed Taste: Tag Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics. In this program, two speakers speak on completely unrelated topics, followed by question and answer session of both at the same time. Past lectures include: Marxism & Kittens, Kittens, Kittens; Tequila & Dark Energy in the Universe; Wittgenstein & Hula Dancing; and Urban Parkour & Bollywood Dance. Using a Labrador Retriever for its logo, The Lab combined serious contemporary art exhibitions with self-deprecating humor, offering sacks of rubble to new members and prank phone calls to donors of $5,000 or more. In 2009, The Lab merged with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, where it continues to run all of its programs, with Lerner at the head of the combined institution.
Other Whimsy
Lord Whimsy has embraced an exaggerated Victorian persona in his own pursuit of intellectual whimsy and silliness. "Like a butterfly captured in a flower's glistening raiment of morning dew, so the thoughts of Lord Whimsy are found in The Affected Provincial's Companion, Volume One. " Lord Whimsy's collection of essays and illustrations are described by the Associated Press as a guide to "post-modern American living," a "lifestyle battlecry, both quaint and radical, lighthearted and dead serious."

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