For over a century, the visual arts, literature, music, and cinema have been full of artists who have played at being fools. Drawing on numerous references – such as Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Stendhal, Lars von Trier, as well as artists Gilles Barbier, Michel Blazy, Paul McCarthy, Robert Filliou – Idiotism particularly decodes the emergence of laughter and the absurd in contemporary art, and the way this opposition to seriousness has become a true artistic subject, reinvented in subversive and enjoyable forms.