Michael Hirschon has a good article in The Atlantic  about the overuse of quirk in such vehicles as This American Life and Flight of the Conchords to name a few

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It’s easy for David Cross’s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I equate this with Youth really. Once you grow up-creatively- you find that the quirk quickly loses its importance and you find yourself going back in time to the classics. Hirschon makes a good point in that folks who embrace quirk really are just setting themselves apart from folks who embrace American Idol; it's the being in-the-now of pop culture but being cooler, deeper, while doing so.