Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice · A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2025 · A People Best Book of November 2025 · An NPR Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2025

A revealing exploration of a quarter century of cultural stagnation, examining the commercial and technological forces that have come to dominate contemporary culture—from music and fashion to art, film, TV, and beyond

Over the past twenty-five years, pop culture has suffered from a perplexing lack of reinvention. We’ve entered a cultural “blank space”—an era when reboots, rehashes, and fads flourish, while bold artistic experimentation struggles to gain recognition. Why is risk no longer rewarded, and how did playing it safe become the formula for success? Acclaimed cultural historian W. David Marx sets out to uncover the answers.

In this ambitious cultural history, Marx guides us through the blur of the twenty-first century so far, from the Obama era to the rise of K-pop, from Paris Hilton to the Marvel cinematic universe, from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift to . . . Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, whose enduring influence highlights both their adaptability and the broader shifts in pop culture. Combining sociological, economic, and political insights with a deep dive into art, street culture, fashion, and technology, Blank Space dissects the rise of profit-driven, formulaic trends and the shifting cultural norms that often prioritize going viral over innovation. He reveals how backlash against indie snobbery and nineties counterculture gave rise to a “counter-counterculture”—one marked by antiliberal sentiment, the celebration of business heroes, and the increasing influence of industry plants and the elite class. In a world of crypto bros, nepo babies, and AI-driven art, Marx offers readers a much-needed dose of clarity and context.

Vibrantly narrated and sharply argued, Blank Space is an essential guide for anyone looking to understand the chaos of the twenty-first century, the trends, tastemakers, and icons who shaped it, and how we might push our culture forward over the next quarter century—through renewed emphasis on creativity, community, and the values that transcend mere profit.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Pop Culture, Sociology, Cultural, Audiobook, Society

383 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 18, 2025

About the author

W. David Marx is a long-time writer on culture based in Tokyo. He is the author of "Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style" (2015) and "Status and Culture" (2022). Marx's newsletter can be found at culture.ghost.io.

Reviews

[Kaleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blank Space is THE pop culture history I've been waiting for.

In a sea of pop culture history books that tend to just rehash everything we lived through without really adding anything new, Blank Space offers a criticism and analysis of pop music, style, culture, and counterculture with actual theory and insight to sink your teeth into. You won't just feel like you're going down memory lane, you'll actually be learning and getting smarter. He discusses topics like indie sleaze, poptimism, generative AI, and the manosphere and explains their relationship to commerce and politics, how they came to be, the inner workings and dynamics of how they succeeded and/or failed, and the lasting impact they had on changing culture. The book is also funny and often even biting because it needs to be, but it's so well-researched and you can tell the author is obviously passionate and an expert about the subjects. (Marx's previous book, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change is just as delicious and vital btw!!!)

Blank Space is a MUST if you like pop culture, history, or want to better understand the connection between pop culture and politics.

Thank you to Viking and Netgalley for the ARC.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for the ARC of this title.

This is probably closer to a 3.5 than a 3 - I like this author working on THIS topic, but I was left a little underwhelmed by the abruptness of the way this ended. On the other hand, given that this is an extremely recent history, was there any other way this _could_ end?

This book asks a really good question - why does it feel like there's not any defining culture for the 2010s and 2020s in the same way we can easily classify "the 80s", "the 90s", y2k, etc.? It also goes an impressive way towards covering all of the trends and changes on the business side of things that's gotten us to where we are today. The way very recent history (and I do mean VERY recent: this applies the same talking-about-the-past language we associate with histories written about events 30 years ago to events that happened in 2024. It is late 2025 as I write this.) gets covered feels like it's all getting to a "here's how we got here" point that will be followed by some solid "and here's what we can do" chapters.

And yet: we only get one "conclusions" chapter. Which? fair. We're still in 2025 and it may be too early to really say what will get us out of our stagnated state of culture. And yet, I found myself not really buying Marx's sudden decision that what's really the bad guy here is "poptimism". After a ton of very solidly written chapters covering a ton of cultural spheres, this last-second "here's what the real problem is" felt incredibly underbaked and felt more like a personal bugbear for Marx than a solid argument for a source of the problem. The rest of his suggestions on what makes for more dynamic culture are great! The final arguments needed a better reasoning, and left me frustrated after what had been a fairly compelling history of recent culture.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating look at a culture that hasn’t so much stagnated as frozen and become so ubiquitous, bland, and palatable as to be completely non-existent, as W. David Marx says, a “blank”.

I’ve long felt that pop culture has stagnated since the 90’s. I mean that was the last decade with a definable aesthetic and vibe to it, you know? The 70’s was disco and bell bottoms, the 80’s was hairspray and Reaganomics, the 90’s was grunge and irony laden detachment. Each of those decades recalls an evocative style, an ethos, almost a smell; they’re that distinct.

But the 2000’s and 2010’s? How were those decades culturally different from one another? Despite a few small things, what is really so different about 2010’s culture and 2020’s culture? What are the 2010 equivalent of bell bottom jeans? For years I was assured this suspicion was simply because I’m getting old, which, to be fair, is correct. However, there IS something afoot that can’t simply be chalked up to my new random joint pain and now having definite opinions about grocery store layouts.

The author does a better job laying it all out than I could. I learned a lot and also had some personal observations and feelings vindicated.

There’s a host of reasons for this bizarre null feeling around current popular culture. Hyper nostalgia that obsessively regurgitates the same handful of iconic media, the complete takeover of all artistic pursuits by entrepreneurial capitalism, the flattening effect of an internet largely made up of only a few monolithic social media sites.

Here are a couple key takeaways I found fascinating.

High finance has become ever more entwined with the production of film and television resulting in the rash of remakes, sequels and reboots, the absolute terror of anything original as a simple risk averse investment strategy. The lack of creativity is in some ways the point as art isn’t the desired goal anymore, a higher return on investment is. This is the main reason why there are almost no original movies coming out, everything has to be tied to an already existing property, something with a built in audience.

“Omnivore monoculture”, is a useful phrase the author coined encapsulating the ubiquitous sameness of all aspects of music, tv, film, etc. Genres are no longer distinct as much as they are different codes for saying the same thing. Nothing is niche anymore, everything is everywhere and you almost can’t help hearing about it. Styles and trends overlap and fuse together in a way that could theoretically be exciting, but ultimately ends up producing high quality, mediocre content.

This was an entertaining and informative read. I think it would be particularly impactful for readers, like me, who lived through the time covered here. But I could see it having something for almost any reader.

[Chris M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great cultural analysis about the social, political and technological changes that took place from 2000 to 2025 and how they resulted in a cultural blank space, and overall, Marx is very accurate. One of the overarching themes in the book is that art, music, and culture became eclipsed by commercialization. He makes the case that when making money becomes the primary incentive, the quality of art and culture becomes watered-down and is less likely to challenge the status quo.

Other global events like the 2008 recession played a role too as executives became more risk averse and relied on established artists and franchises instead of investing in something new. This is evident in the growth of remakes, reboots and sequels in entertainment.

While the author is very knowledgeable about art and culture, he's not as knowledgeable in other areas. In chapter 13, he implied that all vitamins and supplements are placebos and scams. While there are bad actors, there are plenty of supplement companies that make products based on science and data and don't have a celebrity spokesperson. The examples he used were from celebrity endorsed products, which shows an availability bias.

His solution for addressing the cultural blank space is unclear and probably unrealistic. It also doesn't factor in the role that A.I. generated art and music will play. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. There would need to be a mass rejection of the status quo for that to happen, and as long as money is the primary incentive, I don't see people abandoning their source of income any time soon nor the convenience of quick access. There certainly does need to be a balance between making quality art and being able to make a living, but ultimately art scene cred doesn't pay bills.

[Craig Marvele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enjoyed the author’s previous book “Status and Culture” 3 years ago, so got my hands on this one early thanks to a good friend who got first dibs.

Here is my honest take on it :

Blank Space is, in many ways, a testament to W. David Marx’s extraordinary ability to marshal vast bibliographies, track intellectual lineages across cultures, and stitch together patterns with impressive fluency. A decade ago, this method—an almost virtuosic accumulation of references, quotes, and cross-disciplinary comparisons—would have felt extraordinary. Pre-ChatGPT, the book’s sheer density of citations might have passed as a kind of cultural x-ray: here is someone who has read everything so you don’t have to!

But in 2025, the effect is strikingly different.

The very technique that once defined Marx’s authority now reads less like original insight and more like a beautifully organized database. The synthesis is thorough, yes—but depth of reading is no longer rare. Summaries, cross-cultural parallels, etymologies, even “patterns” across time can now be generated in seconds by any reasonably advanced model. This shifts the criteria for what counts as meaningful intellectual contribution. Simply having read a lot—simply connecting a lot—is no longer enough.

And that is where Blank Space falters. Beneath the avalanche of references lies surprisingly little that feels new. The central argument—that culture is stagnating—has merit, but Marx states it mostly in the register of lament (against suspiciously shallow framings of poptimism/omnivore culture/“inclusiveness”) rather than revelation. It’s a diagnosis without a prognosis, an extended moan about diminishing novelty rather than an attempt to offer alternatives, frameworks, or even provocations that push the conversation forward.

The book’s encyclopedic quality, once a strength, becomes a kind of camouflage: the breadth of sources creates the appearance of profundity, but the conclusions rarely rise above what culturally literate readers already suspect. In a world awash with AI-enabled synthesis, the question is no longer what one can compile from the global archive, but what one can argue, risk, or imagine. On that front, Blank Space feels curiously hollow—fitting, perhaps, given its title.

There is also an undercurrent in the book—subtle but noticeable—of resentment toward popular creators and commercially successful cultural producers. The critique of stagnation sometimes reads less like a structural analysis and more like an autobiographical grievance: a scholar frustrated that others profit from creating widely embraced work while he has devoted his career to niche areas that command reverence but not mass appeal (quick search reveals that Marx’s first book was “Ametora” , a book that appeals to a relatively small niche of Japanophiles) The book’s grand thesis occasionally feels like a gloss over a more personal tension: the suspicion that cultural stagnation is partly a story about his own position within the cultural economy.

This subtext doesn’t ruin the book, but it does color it. Rather than rising above the dynamics he critiques, Marx sometimes seems ensnared by them—using intellectual density as a shield, and cultural pessimism as a way of elevating his own choices.

Had Blank Space been published ten years ago, the mastery of material alone would have made it indispensable. Today, in an age or AI-enables synthesis, it reads more like a well-curated scrapbook of cultural melancholy: impressive in scope and structure, but lacking the spark of genuine intellectual novelty. I did, however enjoy the witty sarcasm in parts of the book.

[lindsi · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was fine but I didn’t feel like I learned anything. It was like a much less focused Filterworld with even less materialist analysis. Disappointing.

[Kate Goodman · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." - Karl Marx

W. David Marx somehow wrote an entire book without any materialist grounding. a real Chuck Klosterman for our times. /derogatory

[Leo]

Imo, this book provokes a much-needed reckoning with our cultural cul-de-sac, pondering questions like: Why are there no heads anymore? (In the sixties, kids dismissed the previous paradigm, jazz, as hopelessly antiquated; today’s young adults enjoy Katri Helena.) How did conservatism become the hip counterculture and social progressives the squares? When did Silicon Valley regress from genuine innovation into little more than a hunt for new ethical lines to cross? And so on. Very interesting. Also not as negative as I thought, as Marx is quite funny with his words. Klosterman is the obvious comparison, but Marx is more systematic (historian), while Klosterman writes from an affective point of view (critic), I reckon… Anyhow, the hardest recommend.

[Ashley (ashreadsitall) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️ “Over the past twenty-five years, culture has prospered as a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering—but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.”

“…we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.”

This was an incredibly insightful read that I finished in one day! The author takes a look at the “blank space” culturally speaking that we’ve seen in the past 25 years. If you’ve ever wondered how the 2000s and beyond will be remembered, it’s all referenced in this book and I gotta tell you. I’m embarrassed. It’s forgettable and a bit sad compared to previous generations.

Common themes include: Kanye, Kardashians and Trump. Not much to be proud of here. The author does an excellent job citing pop culture, music, movie and political references and gives five steps for rebuilding our cultural innovation at the ends. This is a worth the read!

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, I think it’s important to note that this book is not, as the subtitle suggests, discussing the culture of the 21st century. It is discussing the pop culture of the 21st century. There are no mentions here of fine art, literature, classical music, opera, and such.

I think it’s also important to note that we are about one quarter of the way into the 21st century at the moment, so this is, of course, a history of only the first 25 years of the century.

All of that is to preface the fact that Marx wants to tell you that the 21st century thus far essentially has no culture. Or pop culture. He’s conflating the two.

While I think there’s plenty to criticize about a lot of this century’s cultural tastes and patterns, I also don’t trust criticism that essentially wants to tell you nothing but that everything is awful. Marx does a better job than some of keeping a lot of his personal opinions out of the narrative except when they are necessary, but he’s pretty clear that his overall view of this century so far is basically that it sucks here.

Marx is about my age so the comparison trap here is tough to get on board with. We were in our late teens when the calendar turned over at Y2K, so this is the first set of decades in which we were actually old enough to have both the cultural sentience and personal taste required to even have informed opinions on culture. So it’s a tough sell to imply even slightly the idea of wanting to go back to a better, more cultured (again, he means pop cultured) time, aside froM some pangs of childhood nostalgia.

Marx makes some solid observations on some of the things that negatively shaped pop culture in the aughts (post 9/11 forced patriotism and American exceptionalism, etc), but later misses on things like OWS, which has perhaps lasting historical and political significance, but little to no (pop) cultural significance.

There’s also a lot of low hanging fruit taking up space here, leaning on things that trigger the “problematic!” sirens from the early 2000s. Are people really still blaming Paris Hilton for this much personal nonsense? Sigh.

If you’re just looking for a summary of pop cultural moments and events that have contributed to the American collective taste this century, I suppose this is an okay place to do that (though I would still caution that a lot of what was good or positively impactful was conveniently left out of the narrative or devalued here). If you want actual fair and balanced criticism of 21st century pop culture, look elsewhere.

*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

[Emily Kessinger · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read Blank Space as soon as it came out and recently read Marx’s Atlantic article, “Make Culture Weird Again.” — a piece that pushed me to finally write this review. The article implied that more esteem should be given to “weird” things without acknowledging that “weird” is subjective, elastic, culturally dependent — and, frankly, often just code for “things Marx personally thinks are brilliant.” The idea of “weirdness” he champions isn’t weird at all; it’s simply niche taste masquerading as a universal cultural metric. That blind spot played out across this entire book.

After reading Blank Space, it’s hard to shake the sense that Marx is less interested in understanding culture than in positioning himself close to it. The constant name-dropping — celebrities, indie musicians, designers, tech figures, creators — feels less like evidence and more like an attempt to borrow clout from people who actually shaped the culture he’s critiquing. The references pile up, but the insight never does.

The book starts with a promising premise about digital flattening and the disappearance of strong curatorial voices, but the argument stalls almost immediately. Each chapter follows the same rhythm: a broad observation, a cascade of citations, a detour into some 2000s microtrend, and then a resigned lament about how things used to be. Nothing builds. Nothing resolves. The middle chapters in particular feel like endlessly rearranged versions of the same idea (it is, however, impressive how much time Marx must have spent reading).

What becomes increasingly clear — and increasingly uncomfortable — is the tone of frustration that runs under the surface. Marx seems almost resentful of creators who turned visibility into success. Rather than interrogating the economic and technological structures that shape cultural production, he circles back to a familiar implication: if culture is “stagnant,” it’s partly because successful people don’t deserve the influence they have. It’s a critique bordering on bitterness. While it could be true, it is unclear what kind of “art” exactly Marx believes deserves higher esteem.

The irony is that Blank Space ends up exemplifying the very stagnation it claims to diagnose. It’s a remix of other people’s theories, filtered through nostalgia for a past cultural gatekeeping ecosystem that never really existed in the clean form he idealizes. There are brief moments where he almost breaks new ground on algorithms or attention economies, but they dissolve quickly under the weight of more references.

In the end, Blank Space is full of names but empty of synthesis — a cultural critique so obsessed with orbiting influence that it never develops gravity of its own.

[Eiríkur Norðdahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um margt óvitlaus bók en setur allan fókus á tískustrauma til þess eins að hafna þeim - hunsar sjálf þá menningu sem hún þykist tigna (en þekkir bara í forml grunge-stjarna). Sem sagt sek um allt sem hún fordæmir. Kenningin, að popptivismi og alætur og sjálfhverfa og vinsældaþrá sé að gera út af við menninguna, er ekki röng - en það vantar allt mótvægi í hana, allan áhuga á því sem er raunverulega krefjandi, utangarðs, sjálfstætr og/eða frumlegt.

[Deven Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at how culture is largely driven by financial forces towards "omnivore monoculture" - a world where the majority of music and art is palatable, unremarkable, and nearly indistinguishable. It's unfair to say art is poor quality now, but Marx argues boundaries are not pushed as often, and genres have seemingly gone away in favor of the lowest common denominator. I'm inclined to agree.

Cool book if you're generally aligned with Marx's tastes/ideologies.

[hajin yoo · Rating 3 out of 5]

- took me too long to read for no reason… i’m reading 70 books next year or so help me God…
- mr marx otter stick to termite topics…. a cultural history of the 21st century is a mighty task perhaps nobody is up to take…
- lots of fun factoids in this one, though! survivor dp went to the office !

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating deep dive into 21st century culture, well-researched and sharply written. Even with a narrower focus than Marx's last book, the amazing Status and Culture, it sometimes feels like it covers too much to go especially deep into any one thing, reading at times like a zippy overview of the last 25 years without much analysis (and it's clearly focused on the aspects of culture that most interest Marx - music, fashion and tech, primarily). The analysis that is there is excellent, though, as Marx does a great job at pulling out the threads and the people that link these disparate elements of contemporary culture. In the process, he paints a pretty bleak, but overall quite accurate, portrait of where we're at as a culture.

[Jeremy Malizola · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.)

As someone who feels troubled and alienated by our current cultural landscape and how art is presently engaged with, I’m hungry for anything that can make sense of these times. That being said, this was easily my most anticipated book of the year.

I liked this book a lot but felt slightly let down by its briefness and pacing. It’s predominantly a cultural history of our current century with some of the authors criticism, suggestions, and point-of-view mixed in at the beginning and end. The history portion was well done and thorough enough but I was left wishing the author spent a bit more time fleshing out the connection between each point of history to the corresponding qualities of current culture that is (brilliantly) laid out in the opening section of the book. The connections were there but I was longing for deeper description, sometimes the history began to feel simply listed rather than discussed. In the conclusion section, i greatly connected with and agreed with all of the points and expressed but once again was left wanting more. The authors point-of-view and opinion on a solution to the “blank space” feels well argued, sensible, and exciting; I would be happy to read a book length expansion of just the conclusion of this book.

Overall, I loved all of the content in this book but just wish it was longer, paced a bit differently, and contained a lot more criticism/discussion than is provided. But what is provided is exciting, thought-provoking, and vital, and I will be sharply tuned in to whatever Marx does next.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and Viking Penguin for an advance copy of this book that looks at the cultural and artistic history of the 21st century when borrowed nostalgia and the influx of money has turned what used to creative fires into ways of making people famous for famous sake, leaving us with few things to remember or even to care about.

I remember being young and wanting to know everything about everyone in the entertainment I liked. I read magazines, books, watched cable documentaries, tracked down zines, everything I could in the pre-Internet days to to get more information on bands, movies, books, comics, even zines. Working in bookstores and music stores helped, but there was so much to enjoy I knew I could never keep up. Nor could my wallet. By the start of the 2000's this interest was slowly decreasing. My father had passed, my job wasn't that fun, and the cultural landscape was changing. This happens as one ages out of something, but and maybe I am no better than those that say music was only good when I was seventeen, and SNL was only funny when I was in college, things I don't agree with in the slightest. There was some stuff, some music, some movies, but everything started seeming, well bland. One started to notice celebrities pushing things, advertising things, something few ever did. Reality shows appeared everywhere. Gossip was news, big news, and people were being famous for being famous. And one could almost follow the money and see where things were going. Things that W. David Marx discuses in this really impressive, throughly sourced book. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is a look at the last 25 years, where we are going and why things seem so safe, so kid tested and mother approved, and what this might mean for our culture.

The book begins with discussions about the biggest moment of the earliest part of our century, 9/11 and how in the interest in being safe, suddenly if became hip to be square. People went from begin mad at a stolen election, so suddenly wanting to kill foreigners for the lost feeling f American dominance we had grown accustomed to. This sense of conservatism, see the rise of Vice Media, and the founder of the company, began to affect the creation of art in this country. Suddenly selling out wasn't a bad thing. It was the only thing. Greed was officially good, and while the collapse of the economy made people pretend to be less interested in the better things in life, this did on last long. Music was becoming more beats orientated, songs written by committee, sometimes never even being in the same room. Outrage seemed almost nostalgia, a Lady Gaga compared to say Madonna. Movies were the same, remakes, repeats, soft reboots, hard reboots, as companies tried to deal with both waning interest, and video games. Adding to all of this was money. Money on top of money. Tech was the new religion, and they began to spread their money, and power, pivoting from print media to video, destroying whole swathes of media with dreams of control that we are still dealing with today.

There is a lot going on in the book. First Marx did a tremendous job researching and bringing divergent ideas together, linking things that I had never thought of but now can't get them out of my head. Marx looks at the nostalgia trend that demands that things not be too new, but familiar. How innovation, recklessness and failure are steered away from, in pursuit of the familiar, the stuff that plays on American Idol. People are not having careers in the arts any more they are having moments, and there are others who want the fame waiting in the wings. Every page has something to think about, something to mull on and of course things that one disagrees with. Just like entertainment used to be.

A book worthy of reading and discussing, with no real answers, and a darkness on the horizon when it comes to new things. A book that made me think far more than I expected, and made me remember when I used to care about the things I liked. My first experience with W. David Marx, but hopefully not my last.

[Rob Harvilla]

This was the state of pop culture in the twenty-first century: artists and fans joining forces united in one corner of a corporate rivalry between multi-millionaires, battling over rights management as a means of securing long-term passive income streams.

The "Taylor's Version" solution fit neatly within the entrepreneurial ethos championed by figures like Jay-Z, in which capital accumulation was framed as an act of heroism. In this ultrapoptimist worldview, wealth creation wasn't just a goal but a measure of democratic and cultural success. Fans eagerly joined their idols in the quest for financial domination, viewing their loyalty and spending as a form of empowerment. As money became synonymous with popularity, industry executives achieved parity with the artists they represented.

The 2017 documentary The Defiant Ones reflected this shift. Directed by Menace II Society cocreator Allen Hughes, the film follows Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre as coequal protagonists, culminating in Apple's acquisition of their company, Beats. In the old logic of cool, defiance was a noble act—an artistic stand again authority. But The Defiant Ones redefined it, equating N.W.A.'s culture-bending releases (e.g., "Fuck Tha Police") with Iovine's "greatest hits": coercing Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty into making radio-friendly singles, peddling the monstrous Marilyn Manson's banal provocations to suburban teens, and turning his entire Interscope artist roster into a marketing team for Beats headphones. The Defiant Ones framed industry profiteering as equally valuable as the art it commercialized. And as Taylor Swift continued to show, fans were right there with their idols—cheering on their quest to escape the embarrassment of being mere multimillionaires.

[loafingcactus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ack, I wasted an audible credit on this hoax of a book! My first impression is that the book is extremely BORING. Now boring can mean “eat your vegetables” or it can be a signal to the reader that there is something wrong with the book. Not to my credit, it took me until chapter five to realize it was the latter.

At this point, Simon Reynolds was quoted. The quote had some words that sounded good, so I decided to copy it down. As I copied it down, I realized the quote had no meaning in the English language. So the question is, did the author of this book have AI gather him a collection of newspaper articles and quotes that he re-wrote into mostly natural language, or was he himself so incompetent that he wrote down these words not catching that they were MEANINGLESS.

As it goes on here are some other words the author misdefines & mis-historicizes: globalist, wokeness, thin blue line.

So what can you learn from this book? At the point where I extricated myself in chapter 10, the main take home is that whether the re-written string of newspaper clippings that makes up this book was created by AI or by an actual human collection, it is an emblem of the hollowing out of news reporting in the era the book means to cover. If a person living through this era didn’t make any effort, they too may well have come out of it not knowing what any of these words mean.

That the book has reached such acclaim suggests an era of readers trained on that shallow reporting and more recently on AI junk who are unable to identify a lack of meaning in a sentence or lack of context or originality in a book. This book will stand as a warning to future of what our population, even the population of readers, has become in 2025.

[Robert Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by W. David Marx offers a sharp, accessible analysis of how culture in the 2000s, 2010s, and even now shifted away from clear movements, shared values, and recognizable hierarchies toward fragmentation, irony, and individual branding. Marx argues that the collapse of traditional cultural gatekeepers such as critics, magazines, record labels, and institutions created a “blank space” in which taste no longer follows a coherent narrative. Instead of dominant trends, we see micro-scenes, algorithmic influence, and constant reinvention. Drawing from music, fashion, internet culture, and politics, Marx situates these changes within larger economic and technological forces, especially social media and the machine that is capitalism.

One of the book’s strengths is the author's ability to connect everyday cultural phenomena such as playlists, hype cycles, normcore fashion, and online outrage to deeper structural shifts in power and meaning. He shows how cultural participation increasingly rewards visibility and self-presentation rather than craft or ideology, leaving artists and consumers alike navigating a landscape of perpetual performance. While Marx is critical of this environment, he avoids nostalgia, acknowledging that the democratization of culture has also expanded access and representation. His tone balances cultural criticism with sociological insight, making complex ideas readable without oversimplifying them.

Overall, this book is a compelling reflection on what it means to create, consume, and identify with culture in the quarter of the twenty-first century. The book is especially valuable for readers interested in media studies, cultural history, or the politics of taste, as it provides a useful framework for understanding why contemporary culture often feels chaotic, hollow, or exhausting. Marx does not offer easy solutions, but his diagnosis is persuasive and thought-provoking, encouraging readers to question how value, authenticity, and meaning are produced in a world where everything is visible and nothing seems to last.

[Erica Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just don't know how I feel about this book. As someone who lived in NYC and worked for Paper Magazine during the early 00's period that Marx documents, it was a lot of fun to read about the people I knew and the life I lived nearly 20 years later. As well, Marx's premise that we've lost distinct culture due to five factors: 1) omnivorism, 2) poptimism, 3) entrepreneurial heroism, 4) the counter-counterculture, 5) digital norm evasion. There's a lot of disparate subcultures on display here and ultimately, while this was a fun fact down memory lane, I think we've made this a super complicated thesis.

Tyler the Creator told the New York Times earlier this year, "I don’t know if youth culture exists anymore,” he says. “I think a 42-year-old and a 15-year-old could have the same humor and style.” He thinks back on himself as a teen, caught up in “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” (2007), a song that many older hip-hop heads despised. (At the time, Ice-T said that the song “single-handedly killed hip-hop.”) “And now,” Tyler adds, “it’s like, people be on Twitter, 25 years’ age difference, talking about the same thing.”

So I think I feel like we might be overthinking this whole blank space of culture. After a while, it all just felt so tedious and overwrought. Marx has definitely done his research. Like everything else in this world, could it be as simple as global consumerism monetizing all vestiges of individuality...

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking Penguin | Viking for the advance reading copy.

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot believe we've gotten to the point where we can reflect back on 25 (!) years of culture within the 21st century, but here we are so let's dig in.

BLANK SPACE by W. David Marx is at once a fun trip down nostalgia, and a dark tread through the horrors of our recent past. He does an incredible job taking us through how the cultural landscape post 9/11 shaped entertainment, the Internet, and, most depressingly, politics. Marx argues that the confluence of reboots, retreads, and reinvention has left a blank space where flourishing art should be. While everyone wants to make a quick buck instead of relishing in a true artistic lifestyle, culture has seeing the consequences and we, as a culture, have been impacted by too many "playing it safe."

While this is a hard read at times, I really enjoyed every minute. It is fun to be able to look back at cultural studies and remember living through it, and seeing how then relates to now. It's maybe one small good part of getting older. Reflection is important, even if the past 25 years feel like a total blur. Wrapping up with how the Right suddenly became counter-culture (can you imagine saying that in the 90s?), and how we need to make sure AI slop doesn't become the artistic norm, this is an invaluable read for anyone interested in our current state of pop culture, and how we've gotten to where we are. And yes, Taylor Swift features heavily.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I hear the word"culture".....

Marx expounds on modern culture, especially the state of pop culture, in a thought provoking way often mirroring what I've observed over the past 2 decades. There's a program on German/French media called 'Tracks' which attempts to capture the cultural zeitgeist - wherein 95% of the time showcasing vacuous fashion victims going through the motions of trying to be edgy and deep. This book describes that cohort with aplomb. However, as Marx puts disclaimers at the outset that he doesn't try to cover 'all' the bases, one can easily nitpick his omission of areas where culture did move ahead (a la electronic music or likely art attempts beyond my ken). Also, his critique of right wing / reactionary culture is interesting but comes across more as shooting fish in a barrel. What would have been more insightful would have been expounding more on the issues with, for lack of a better term, far left milieus with its obsession with id-pol that were also hampering any movement with rigidities that mirrored the far right - one need look only at the vacuousness of a place like Bluesky to see the emptiness. It feels like Marx can't push too far in that direction as to alienate his potential reader base. Still in spite of those shortcomings there was much to ponder and indeed laugh about when it comes to our sorry state we've backed ourselves into.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an electronic ARC via NetGalley.

2025 is too early to write a cultural history of the 21st century. It might not be too early to write a cultural history of the *early* 21st century, but for a book that concludes not much of the era's cultural output will be remembered into the future, it's written far too close to its subject to take a very wide perspective. Maybe the first quarter of the 21st century will be remembered as a cultural blank space, but again: it's still only 2025.

It's an interesting book, and it covers a lot of ground (though most of it is very focused on the United States)--but it's also often rather disjointed. Loosely organized into a handful of time periods and then split into chapters by theme, the basic premise is that between algorithms and the pursuit of profit and maximum popularity, cultural output has stagnated.

There are points here I agree with, and there are points that are very interesting. There are also some strange assertions about Millennials and a broad tendency to ignore things like hobby communities that do foster "niche" content that the book largely maintains no longer exists.

If you're interested in American popular culture at this moment in time, it's an interesting read. It's worth thinking about the book and what it says. But it also leaves things to be desired.

[Bill Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to get perspective about a time period while you are still right inside it, and yet BLANK SPACE, while still smack in the middle of the zeitgeist, finds a way to perfectly distillate with the last quarter century has been like in western society.

The book explores fashion, television, media, news, politics, music, social trends, the internet, and every other thing that was good and terrible and in between since the year 2000.

In the year 2050, if someone wants to know what the first 25 years of the new millennium was like, this is the book that I would recommend. It may not cover every single base, but it covers most of them. It's probably the most interesting book I've read this year.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a fool's errand to take on a history like this, but Marx does an admirable job. The prose is lively and funny, quotations balanced between scholars and Pharrell Williams, and the coverage as thorough as you could likely hope for. Still, it's a shame that the book's thesis comes buried after it's final chapter. As a result, you'll find yourself (assuming your a Millennial reader, such as me) cruising along at nostalgic altitude, but without a sense of much direction for much of the book.

Oh, and a personal gripe - there's a throwaway line early in the book about the Jackass guys being the male equivalent of the Paris Hilton vacuity and craven attention-seeking of the early 2000s which I take a lot of umbrage with.

[David Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

An absolute bummer of a narrative - the 25 year slide into the current moment, posited as the nadir of the 20th century’s broader cultural movement. This book occasionally strayed into territory that really not of much interest to me, such haut couture and streetwear, and its connections to modern hip-hop, as well as NFTs and influencer culture. But overall it was a fairly relentless onslaught of the things that went bad, and why.

The ending makes some suggestions for how to get to a better place, but unfortunately I believe that a near wholesale adoption of A.I. is probably the reason why we’re not getting to that better place anytime soon.

[Yar Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the author's Status and Culture and had high hopes for this which is successful in its bulk, telling the story of American popular culture 2000-2025. But it seemed to want for a hook, so says this culture is stagnant, which is taken as a given and I don't see; there are many thriving subcultures nowadays that pop up all over pop culture; most of pop culture hasn't changed for 70+ years except superficially and thanks to new technology; most of pop culture lacks brilliance and newness because that is its nature, not to mention even genius will create many duds when in bulk (EA Poe, Mozart).

[Ben Cela · Rating 5 out of 5]

W. David Marx has written one of my favorite nonfiction books ever, and one so indispensable for a self-proclaimed cultural critic like myself. I need to buy a copy to add to my ready reference shelf. Marx identifies cultural figures and artifacts and maps them into a larger web of connecting influences. Although Marx chronicles up to mid-2025, my hope is that Marx will reprint Blank Space with more chapters because so much has already happened that requires his keen documentation. Also, his take on Addison Rae as a failed, uninspired TikTok-turned-musician has already aged like milk, and I need him to write a new section on her rising star.

[Chris Barsanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

The phrase “Time is a flat circle” often refers to how the manic post-pandemic news cycle makes comprehension of the recent past impossible. A similarly dazed bafflement is explored in W. David Marx’s lucid and entertaining —yet despairing — book about the new millennium’s flattening of culture. Blank Space is not just a Taylor Swift hit...

Full review is at The Minnesota Star-Tribune.