This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Are you not entertained? Of course you are. We can barely move for entertainment. Songs, clips, memes, takes, games, reboots, thinkpieces, livestreams, “content”. Everything clamouring for attention, nothing sticking around long enough to matter. An endless supply of novelty that somehow never amounts to change. David Marx’s Blank Space is about that strange paradox of contemporary culture: total saturation and stagnation all at once.
“Culture” today is everywhere and nowhere. It dominates our politics, our identities, even our shopping habits. But it mostly operates at the level of distraction and commerce. Marx’s central claim is that, at a symbolic level, very little genuinely new has emerged for decades. Nothing really replaces anything else. The past is endlessly recycled, “flattened into yet another aesthetic ingredient.” We live amid reruns, sequels, revivals, and prestige nostalgia – right down to the latest film about Elvis, a man who once terrified parents and now comes pre-packaged for mass appeal.
Marx isn’t the first to complain about cultural stagnation and degradation. Adorno was at it before pop culture had fully learned to smile back. Simon Reynolds diagnosed “retromania” in 2011, a few years after Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism asked why we seem incapable of imagining any genuine alternative to the present. But Blank Space earns its keep through the sheer scale of its precision. Moving steadily from 2001 to the present through an intelligently curated timeline, Marx builds a case about how Western pop culture slipped into a glossy holding pattern by sedimenting an incredible mass of well-chosen detail.
Read at speed, almost like a thriller, Blank Space strikes the reader with how quickly this recent history already feels half-erased, submerged by the constant demand for whatever comes next. With stimulating sharpness, Marx grants substance to habits that have become so familiar we barely notice them: “omnivorism”, which flattens cultural hierarchies; “poptimism”, which treats popularity as proof of worth; and a cult of entrepreneurial success that confuses profit with creativity.
Marx’s account of the rise of the internet, social media, and streaming platforms is refreshingly unsentimental. It develops arguments from Status and Culture (2022), where he traced how easy access to information and goods flattened cultural value and elevated money as the supreme status symbol. Spotify is a case in point: although it runs on abundance and accessibility, its business model masks a shrinking market, where algorithms replace aesthetic discrimination and musicians, classical players especially, are left scrambling. Engaging with culture and art – whether by reading, listening, commenting, arguing – has never been an effortless task. But contemporary tools strive to make our experience frictionless and, in doing so, reshape human judgement. “Taste” itself becomes suspect because it implies exclusion, further fostering our paralysis.
Catering for audiences in order to achieve commercial success increasingly means abandoning musical or lyrical ambition altogether. Risk-aversion rules. Easy money dictates form. Pop stars resemble brands rather than artists. Madonna’s and Britney Spears’s successors, from Lady Gaga to Sabrina Carpenter, exult market-driven personalities who ungrudgingly outsource their songwriting. Marx has a gift for unearthing telling stories, like Taylor Swift’s own account of her empire: “I’m an industry, a conglomerate. I’m Taylor Swift Inc.”
Too many tastemakers simply have no taste at all
And so Blank Space doesn’t shy from the truth: too many tastemakers simply have no taste at all, because they don’t need it. Paris Hilton and the Kardashians show that notoriety is its own kind of currency, which makes self-promotion (at literally any cost) a moral obligation. Respect for all and any tastes becomes a marketing doctrine. Consumers are not passive in this economy since they elect a new aristocracy of billionaires, who then congratulate one another from inside an echo chamber. Hip-hop’s journey from outsider expression to soundtrack for luxury consumption is here a case in point.
Marx also follows the argument into even less comfortable territory, such as Silicon Valley’s cultish faith in entrepreneurs and exploitation concealed by the rhetoric of disruption. Linking aesthetics and ethics, he recalls how cultural stagnation feeds narcissism, therapeutic obsession, and conspiracy-thinking.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the book is heavily anglo-centric, and it is regrettable that some left-leaning assumptions are left unchecked. But as it despairs about the counter-countercultural movement that turns transgressions to progressive doxa as “cool”, Marx does have a point: the Right has no real answer. TikTok vaudeville and persona-driven Twitter accounts aren’t long-term solutions to art stagnation.
Amid Marx’s tentative solutions, the most convincing is probably the least popular: stop giving people what they want (or think they want). Culture has never renewed itself by chasing demand. To break free from that “blank space”, we must refuse to mistake resignation for sophistication.
