Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is a book about the art of our time that mentions only one museum: the Museum of Ice Cream. W. David Marx’s ambitious but flat-footed hot take arrives at under 300 pages and opens by citing other writers of his demographic, all of whom have diagnosed the same cultural illness: The 21st century, they insist, has stopped innovating. Jason Farago of The New York Times chimes in: “We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” Alex Ross of The New Yorker adds that the Internet’s promised “long tail” of infinite cultural diversity “never materialized.” For Marx’s part, “Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a blank space.”
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Like his peers, Marx blames the Internet and the economies it fomented for today’s supposed stagnation, making his argument about unoriginality, ironically, unoriginal. He longs for an era when subcultures and music scenes offered community, and when a neat procession of -isms—Realism, Impressionism, Cubism—seemed to move culture forward in a tidy line. He echoes Farago’s nostalgia for “looking at cultural works as if they were posts on a timeline, moving forward from Manet year by year.”
But this is a dated, misguided understanding of how history works, rooted in a 19th-century fallacy called positivism: the belief that history moves in a clean, linear progression of successive innovations. It comes from Hegel, who imagined a “world spirit” guiding humanity toward ever-greater rationality. Hegel’s ideas shaped narratives of art history as a series of stylistic advances—from Symbolic to Classical to Romantic—until the positivist project died in the wake of the mid-20th century’s violence, when it became clear to all concerned that we were not getting more rational.
But even before that collapse, the linear model failed to capture art’s reality. In recent decades, art historians have been busy rediscovering overlooked artists and movements whose contributions expose the frailty of the old canon. Abstraction, we now know, was not invented by a heady white-cube man but had many precursors, from Islamic art to the work of a Swedish spiritualist woman named Hilma af Klint. Surrealism borrowed from a Haitian Vodou priest named Hector Hyppolite, whom André Breton collected—to name just two examples. Multiple conversations were always happening at once; historically, only one demographic had the power to declare its own contributions “Art.”
But even if art had unfolded in a perfectly positivist line, reductivist abstraction was widely seen as painting’s logical endpoint, with Ad Reinhardt declaring in the 1960s that, with his black squares, he was making “the last painting that could be made.” Where exactly was the next -ism to go but backward?
Where art actually went was to postmodernism—which is not a style or aesthetic movement but a broader reaction against those overly tidy grand narratives. Reading Blank Space—which is indeed full of bad art—I found myself resenting the ur-postmodernist Andy Warhol, whose ghost looms large over our era. Warhol unabashedly collapsed art and commerce and cozied up to celebrities, along the way making fame and money into some of art’s most desirable goals. We are still digging out from under that inheritance.
But there is another omission that seemed so glaring in Farago’s 2023 essay that I was shocked to see it repeated in Marx’s book. Both writers mourn the death of monoculture and its attend subcultures without acknowledging that this death results from our century being the first in which women and people of color could make art and participate in criticism with relative freedom. Contemporary culture may feel pluralistic or “fractured,” but multiple conversations were always happening—only now the old hierarcy of margins and center is muddled. The Internet didn’t destroy monoculture. It exposed the fact that monoculture was always a bottleneck, popped the cork, and let the contents fizz out.
MARX’S BOOK READS AS IF written by someone who gets most of his culture online even as he decries the Internet repeatedly. He writes mostly about American music and TV but lives in Tokyo, and describes our times as overwhelming but boring. He calls for more “complexity, ambiguity, and formal experimentation,” arguing that “these attributes are not elitist; they power the masterpieces that draw millions of people every year to museums,” despite only mentioning the Ice Cream one. And the 21st-century artists he chooses to analyze are revealing. They are exclusively controversial men, known as scenesters and celebrities as much as artists: Beeple, Banksy, Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei, Terry Richardson, David Choe, Dan Colen, and Dash Snow. This is the selection he sets against “fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dada, de Stijl, and surrealism”; no wonder they come up short. The two women artists mentioned briefly are Barbara Kruger, described only as the inspiration for Supreme’s logo, and Laurie Simmons, named alongside Carroll Dunham as the parent of Lena Dunham.
But in his writing on women, Marx’s narrow perspective becomes clearer: he writes much more easily about people he can identify with. The only women who receive more than passing attention are Dunham, Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Kim Kardashian—sellouts and fame-whores, all. He is not a Swiftie, and complains that it is “harder to imagine the end of Taylor Swift than the end of the world,” but then titles his book after one of her most popular songs. Beyond these celebrities, the two significant sections on women in this century are about—I kid you not—Trad Wives and Girls Gone Wild. And to understand what women thought of the latter, he relies on quotes from predator-photographer Terry Richardson and Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis—not from any actual women, never mind those coerced into performing for the cameras. Even his brief #MeToo discussion centers on the ruined careers of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, with the only female voice coming from Lady Gaga, who expresses regret about working with R. Kelly. When Marx writes about heterosexual relationships, he consistently describes men as “taking” women as wives or lovers—an archaic phrasing that betrays his inability to imagine women’s agency.
My point isn’t that Marx isn’t “woke” enough—it’s that he seems ill-equipped to interpret work made by those outside his own demographic, which surely contributes to his belief that culture has lost its way. A pluralistic conversation is an innovation, even if he doesn’t enjoy it. Besides, in the decades after conceptualism, it shouldn’t be surprising that our art focuses more on content than form.
Anyway, Marx’s argument that innovation is dead is never backed by aesthetic analysis. Instead, he offers interesting anecdotes describing how things came to be: that “I’m a Slave 4 U” was originally written for Janet Jackson, not Britney Spears; that Justin Timberlake’s solo debut was a song Michael Jackson rejected (“Rock Your Body”); that Keeping Up With the Kardashians premiered when Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan were both arrested, leaving a vacancy on E!; and that Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony is still at large despite the viral Kony 2012 campaign. These vignettes are entertaining and occasionally illuminating, but they rarely advance his thesis. Chapters pile up as a series of coincidences, each punctuated by a declaration that none of it meant very much.
As history rather than theory, however, Blank Space is decent. Marx loosely identifies a few compelling threads of the culture, portraying, for instance, our century as the century of crossovers. Everything has collapsed into everything else Warholianly—which is to say, in service of expanding markets. Luxury fashion becomes streetwear with Supreme and Virgil Abloh; McDonald’s gets in on it too, teaming up with Palace, Vetements, and Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack label. “Preppy” shifts from private school uniform-style to “people who wear Nirvana shirts,” according to one Gen Z teen, whose friend adds, “Nirvana is my favorite clothing brand,” taking the X-eyed smiley face more as brand than band—never mind the Buddhist concept.
But, as entertaining as this all is, Marx’s preachy conclusion gives the game away. He advocates for “solutions” that already exist, but outside of his purview: smaller artistic communities, art made for reasons other than money, and criticism that does not infantilize art. Then he declares that culture needs a canon and stronger “social norms,” comparing their hypothetical enforcement, bafflingly, to the Mafia’s omertà—threatening to dishonor (or worse) anyone who strays. But gone are the days when there was one shared set of references every artist must respond to or debate, because now, the art world is finally diverse enough to sustain multiple lineages at once. This is frustrating for the narrator who wants to master them all simultaneously but can’t—and worse, doesn’t realize he can’t. We saw it flummox many white male critics addressing the most recent Whitney Biennial, which had more white male reviewers than artists.
Marx does briefly acknowledge in the introduction that his “unconscious biases… shape” his narrative, but he nevertheless proceeds to write in the voice of God, arguing that the century really began on September 11, 2001—five days after he moved to New York City following his college graduation. The book tells sweeping stories and makes huge claims while cherry-picking evidence, its author clearly identifying with the century’s male protagonists. This omniscient style of cultural history has largely fallen out of fashion; leaving aside right-coded books like Sapiens, only writers like Jill Lepore or the late David Graeber still attempt grand narratives successfully, and theirs arrive as rigorous, thousand-page works rather than brisk 300-page diagnoses.
Yet from this unintended bent, one underdeveloped but intriguing theme emerges: the right’s strategic appropriation of coolness, which culminates in a chapter on canceled men (“Boys Gone Wild”). If Marx had leaned into his biased perspective rather than floundering at comprehensiveness, I suspect he would have written something much stronger. Where controversial men are concerned, he has genuinely interesting ideas. Near the end, he argues that our era’s “inclusiveness created the odd situation in which the most fervent, distinct subcultures exist on the political right,” meaning that if pluralism is now mainstream, then to be countercultural is to transgress this—as Kanye West, arguably the book’s protagonist, has done repeatedly. Marx adds that “because these groups are largely motivated by revanchist nostalgia rather than forward-thinking creativity, their creativity is stunted.” And while, for all of Kanye’s many issues, stunted creativity is not one of them, there is something to Marx’s observation about the right co-opting cool while keeping things conservative, even if he can’t identify a similar nostalgia in himself. Indeed, the book opens with a reminder that Vice was started as an explicitly right-wing publication, with founder Gavin McInnes declaring that it was becoming “cooler to be conservative,” interviewing Pat Buchanan, and dismissing the anti-rape slogan “No means no” as puritanical.
If history is any indicator, the men still insisting culture is dead will go down the way critics of Impressionism and Cubism did: as conservative curmudgeons very much on the wrong side of history. You would think writers so obsessed with the past would have learned as much.