( 1 ) Marx's assessment echoes that of a number of writers at The New York Times and The New Yorker, though critic Emily Watlington connects this to a longer trend of cultural pessimism: “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."
Is Culture Dead?Writer W. David Marx thinks so.
Is Culture Dead?Writer W. David Marx thinks so.
What does it say about our culture that two of the most notable musical acts of 2006—Beyoncé and Taylor Swift—were still the most popular in 2024? In his recently published third book, Blank Space, cultural theorist W. David Marx posits that cultural invention in the 21st century has been decelerating, even while cultural production remains constant.
Marx grew up in Florida and now lives in Tokyo. As a kid he got into R.E.M. and Twin Peaks, which, he says, set him off on a lifetime of seeking out “these tiny glimpses of alternative art that broke out of the convention of mass-market entertainment.” But in a world where old music outsells new music and reboots dominate Hollywood, he believes that experimental, innovative art is becoming ever more sidelined—to the detriment of us all.
Ellen Peirson-Hagger: With Blank Space, you set out to write a cultural history of the first quarter of the 21st century. What did you find?
W. David Marx: The history pointed to a collapse of culture as a zone of creative invention, which is the point of culture as I see it: taking existing culture and doing something different with it in order to either move forward with art or create new forms of personal expression or new social movements.1
