Blank Space A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

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

Ambitious . . . Blank Space charts the rise of a pluralistic monoculture that became synonymous with a liberal establishment one that exalted inclusivity and commercial success, while taking its own dominance and appeal for granted. . . . Marx s big, categorical statements stand out because he s one of the few people right now willing to make them. He s engaging in the risk-taking that he calls for in his book.
The New York Times Book Review, Editors Choice

[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

An ambitious history of the twenty-first century . . . Blank Space offers a deep analysis of the void of cultural stagnation that, within the last twenty-five years, has sprouted and blossomed into becoming the status quo.
GQ

[A] fascinating deep dive.
People

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