Blank Space

“A fascinating, astute, lively examination of the decline of groundbreaking creative ambition and innovation in our ultra-postmodern digital era. Happily, W. David Marx isn’t some nostalgic old fogey—he came of age at the turn of this century and yearns for an old-school commitment by creators to attempt the genuinely, excitingly new.” —Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire “Reading Blank Space was the first time this century made any sense to me.” —B. J. Novak, #1 New York Times bestselling author “In this polemical history, Marx, a critic with deep pop culture bona fides, sifts through the onslaught of content both online and off, from the lineup at Lollapalooza to ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’ NFTs, TikTok and A.I. slop, decrying a culture that is overwhelming but artistically banal. ‘Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention,’ he declares, ‘there is now a blank space.’” —The New York Times Book Review, 23 Books Coming in November “[Marx] traces unlikely connections between the dominant trends of the past quarter-century. In the process, he refreshes our understanding of familiar cultural landmarks, even as he shows that they were stale all along.” —The Washington Post “Marx offers an astute glimpse into how culture has stagnated throughout the past twenty-five years while examining how commercial and technological forces have played into that shift.” —The Millions, Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2025 “Marx redramatizes the anni horribiles of the last American quarter century as one big ‘lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.’ In Marx’s coliseum, the gore flies. Blank Space is like taking uncomfortable splash-zone seats to a theater of hypermodern twenty-first century mayhem.” —The Baffler “The first quarter of the twenty-first century had a paradoxical feeling—so much happened and yet nothing happened at all. A triumph of forensic research and pattern recognition, Blank Space cuts through the bustle and the babble to make a senseless time make sense. W. David Marx diagnoses the malaise and even proposes a course of treatment. This is a book that’s fun to agree with and even more fun to argue with.” —Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past “Only Marx, a late Gen Xer with the dogged work ethic of an early Millennial, could so exhaustively document the evaporation of the counterculture and the fragmentation of the monoculture that took place over the past twenty-five years. An engrossing must-read for anyone who wonders not why pop culture died but how.” —Lauren Sherman, coauthor of Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon “W. David Marx’s Blank Space offers the most incisive, in-depth, and indeed revelatory account yet of why our culture has turned its back on creative risk and innovation. For anyone who's been alive these past twenty-five years, Marx's cultural history is a nostalgic trip, a barrage of blasts from the recent past, revisited with fresh eyes. But it also cuts through the noise—no small feat amid the glut of the internet age—tracing the origins of our current cultural and political moment with remarkable acuity.” —Natasha Degen, author of Merchants of Style: Art and Fashion After Warhol “[Marx] draws on a commendable wealth of examples from disparate realms of culture—from the dominance of Japanese streetwear to Nazified internet memes and the “child influencer” the Rizzler—to ably explain what many citizens of the modern world, especially Americans, have long colloquially felt: that our current culture has grown stagnant. A wide-ranging, persuasive, readable treatise on a crucial component of modern life.” — ‎Kirkus Reviews, starred review