Around the corner from where I’m writing this in southern Stockholm, clean center at the dark heart of suburbia’s placid, unquivering normalness, lives a young couple who wake up every day and pretend it’s still 1929. She dresses in Hooverettes and rayon slips, he in a top hat and double-breasted British Warm. She reads housewife magazines from the late ’20s, he polishes the vintage silver sconces. At night she executes 1930s recipes while he sits in the “smoking room” listening to Artie Shaw. Occasionally, when I go out for walks, I can see them strolling along the street. One needn’t squint or look twice. The piled fur lapels are hard to ignore.
Sure, one could be a little suspect of it all, but at this stage of life in the 21st century, theirs seems about as sensible a way to live as any. Don’t care for contemporary life? Don’t like its banality, its ugliness? You could hardly be blamed for locking the doors, hoarding a trove of relics, putting on the Gershwin brothers and drifting off into the past. For the many of us not yet content to give up on the future, we’re stuck with the unenviable task of figuring out how we ended up behind Lewis’ doors of hell, locked from the inside.
Inglorious fate had it that we were born to a century shrunk solemnly beneath the towering shadow of its predecessor. With every sallow year of Hawk Tuah girls and Bob Marley biopics, it’s becoming ever clearer just how badly we miss whatever was going around in 1967. The 20th century was a kind of new renaissance, a breadth of excellence not seen since the days of the Medici, which means that now we’re condemned to find life a little wanting. W. David Marx certainly feels that way. “The profundity of cultural invention in the twentieth century gave us a false faith in its permanence,” he writes, in his introduction to Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, a book whose title attempts to give name to a concept that all of us must, in one way or another, instinctually recognize. That formless ennui, that sour smell of dissatisfaction, that unshakable impression that whatever we’re interacting with — song, film, book, painting — seems hardly worthy of comparison to its forebears. Why, O muses, have you forsaken us? Why, mother of Art, do you make us want so much yet give us so little?
Weeping at the altar of the past is nothing new. Eighteen centuries ago, St. Cyprian was chastising the unacceptable social and cultural decline of his age, longing for the good old days to return. With the death of Michelangelo in 1564, the Italian culturati shuddered at the thought of what fruitless, insubstantial attempts might be made to surpass the unsurpassable perfection of the previous century and a half. Even in the early 20th century it was thought by some that modern life was irretrievably ossified, inert, cast dead by immovable images and well-worn words; that nothing short of revolution would do. Humans, in other words, have forever indulged in a graceless penchant for hyperbole, vague discontentment, and ahistorical whining.
But it’s fair to say that the enormous legacy of the 20th century has somewhat upped the ante on our dissatisfaction. Now, every hour in every country, inboxes fill with the latest cultural lament. Blank Space may take a slightly girthier form, but its impetus comes from the same place: a nebulous feeling that something is deeply wrong, that our culture is sick, that our art is worthless and that, crucially, there still appears to be a way out. Marx’s method of charting the malady is to turn over almost every name-recognizable American cultural product of the last 25 years — “a cultural history of the 21st century” is what he subtitles the book — to locate the signs of cancer. Maybe it’s still in early-stage progression; maybe, if we catch it in time, we can tame the malignancy.
And yet it soon appears that this sort of optimism belongs to a bygone era. What Blank Space instead becomes, and in rather short order too, is a glowing exemplar of the aesthetic ignorance, the intellectual sterility, and the moral confusion that has led us, in a kind of slow dismemberment, to today’s legless travesty of a culture. Those desiring to find more than vibe-based consolatory conclusions and threadbare generalizations should be warned away; Blank Space has nothing for you. That you ever expected it to is perhaps a cautionary sign, a suggestion to step back and see that if you’re still looking for a skerrick of self-aware criticism in a prestige hardback, published by a Big Five imprint and written by a Harvard-educated, cosmopolitan, pop-culture-addicted, too-online, oh-so-well-meaning liberal American “culture” journalist, you need a wake-up call, maybe a stiff drink, better yet a lobotomy. If it’s true that we need books of Blank Space’s ambition more than ever, we can no longer afford books of Blank Space’s self-conception. With a misconceived frame of reference, its anti-art premises, its penchant for paralogisms and rhetorical bluster, and a slew of feebly-drawn conclusions, Marx’s book brings us no closer to digging our way out of the shithole. If anything, it exemplifies just how hard it is to get the stink out of a good man’s clothes.
If you set your mind to the stars, the moon will only disappoint you. “Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a blank space. Over the past twenty-five years,” writes Marx, “culture has prospered as a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering — but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.” Straight away we encounter the first flaking of Blank Space’s chintzy carapace. Though based in Japan for the last two decades, Marx has done little to dilute his West Atlantic attitude towards novelty with the regard for longevity found in his adopted home. He still has a fetish for originality, a kink which turns out to be, over the course of Blank Space’s 384 pages, more than a little masochistic. He longs for the days when “cultural inventors” and artists “challenged convention,” “advocated new value systems,” and “re-shaped established culture at its symbolic core, tweaking human consciousness to reveal new ways to perceive the world.”
What exactly it means to “tweak human consciousness” is a question perhaps not beyond what Marx can think of, but certainly beyond what he can in this book. All W. David can do is spurt out a few dusty vagaries about re-shaping culture and then spend a few hundred pages trying to figure out what exactly he means by that. The book’s mechanism is fairly straightforward: take one cultural product, trend, or “moment”, juice it for a light dribble of pulp, reach a tendentious conclusion, and then proceed after a paragraph or so onto whatever comes next on the conveyor. Flaccid prevarications abound: a song “re-shaping” this, a news outlet “revolutionizing” that, all sense of causation and direction drifting into exactly the kind of airless forgettableness Marx so laments in the book’s opening paragraphs. Among the cats Marx pulls from the bag, we read that “with the iPhone’s arrival . . . anyone could now be online, anywhere, at any time,” or that “despite their chaotic nature, stans contributed significantly to online culture.”
Instead of honing in on the few cultural products he personally considers most consequential — instead of dispersing with the illusion of objectivity and lending a personal version to this “history” — Marx surveys, with treacly and temperate professionalism, the breadth of the cultural swamp. (Maybe, instead of its originality fetish, this attitude of philandering expediency is the book’s most American quality.) From Glee to “Get Lucky,” Steve Aoki to the MCU, Luigi Mangione to Paris Hilton, Tidal to Stüssy, Gwen Stefani to Vanity Fair — it’s a span of references meant to impress, connoting a kind of voracious pop sensibility that would make Marx, theoretically, the ideal intellect to comprehend and synthesize the high-paced eclecticism of culture in the internet age. What intrepid terrains this sensibility won’t cross are hinted at in the book’s opening chapter, which muses on the Strokes, Terry Richardson, VICE, and the rise of Hipsterism — a taste of the book’s real frame of reference. If it didn’t make it to Bedford Avenue or the Lorimer L, it isn’t worth mentioning.
Hipsterism had a two-fold significance. First, it was the earliest sign of a burgeoning Millennial culture, borne of post-9/11 disillusionment, suckled on Fisherian capitalist-realism, reveling in a LARP of bohemian decadence, an attitude of me-first hedonism without the white-dust traces of iniquity nor an ounce of the political mettle one found in the Boomer movements of the ’60s. Secondly, it was arguably the last “movement” that drew its essence from life in a physical location, meaning it was the last movement that could have feasibly belonged in the 20th century. Henceforth we were in the new millennium, stuck with the indignities of its namesake generation.
2002 saw the first pangs of Millennial self-consciousness. Ten years later they had become a professionalized class of strivers and decadents, distilling their cry for help into a self-serving whimper of virtue. Eschewing the Ruskian idea that a society channels its highest desires and aspirations into its art, or the softer, Jewish version that culture could be the religion of the nonbelievers, the Millennials opted to assume en masse the notion that work, which for many of them meant tech, should be a force for good. Along with the Gen X litter-runt too geeky and “techno-optimist” to belong amongst their own kind, the Millennials had, in the span of only a few years, brought us Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Instagram, Tinder, Twitter, and, of course, Facebook, whose IPO in May 2012 created the first class of Millennial billionaires. Apple, the dream factory “connecting” us all, had displaced Exxon as the world’s most valuable company. Jonah Peretti’s early experiments with tailored HTML and keyword-exploiting headlines at the Huffington Post were suddenly de rigueur among the media class. YouTube had figured out the bones of its monetization program, inaugurating the “content-creator” who regularizes his posts like an old mill-worker punching his timecard. Corporations were the culture. This was Millennial reality. We are still living it.
Once market value was conflated with moral value, it would only be a matter of time before aesthetic value fell by the same sword. Soon art became ensnared in its own desolate tunnel: on one end, freaks, eccentrics, and nostalgics; on the other, corporate raiders and the self-styled cultural “elite” dreaming of making art their living. Corporate culture having hoovered up the last crumbs of a selling-out taboo, the artists and audiences began synonymizing commercial and aesthetic success. In Marxian parlance it’s called “Ultrapoptimism,” and it signaled art’s accedence into its lowly Faustian dilemma. There were endless pools of cash to swim in, if one could accept that the art itself would be at best a pleasant diversion, but probably a niche irrelevance. And there, in the halls of decadent privilege, real art has mostly stayed.
I have always rejected the idea that art, film, persona or music becoming commercial means it cannot also be considered cool. The rejection of commerciality “just because” is such a boring and immature argument that is perhaps more suited to some mediums than others but in general I find to be elitist in a way that does not thrill me whatsoever.
So writes Charli xcx, the world’s “realest” pop star, in a long, unedited Substack post entitled “The Death of Cool.” She continues:
My fascination with the combination of high and low has always been a big driver within my work. People who are interested in things deemed as high brow or high art or left of centre seem to feel that undercutting art with something low brow or mass produced degrades the work and people who are more interested in things deemed as low art or popular or utilizing a directness in language seem to find the acknowledgement of theory or history as pretentious. I enjoy the in-between space that this creates.
One imagines Charli gleefully whirling down the vortex of that “in-between space,” together with Andy Warhol (who she mentions), Taylor Swift, and George Lucas. Once her slickly-produced pop slipped into the algorithm and combusted into virality, it made its creator an apostle of the 21st-century concept of artistry: poptimism pure and ascendant. Having now toured every corner of the globe, discovered her political heft (“Kamala IS brat”), and banked a lifetime’s worth of money — in other words, having become a kind of corporation herself — she wants to believe she can return to the silos of cool that she always imagined she’d inhabit. But Charlie has no interest in being David Lynch or Brigitte Bardot. The goal of her art, she now writes, is to find “the apex of cool and commercial.” Staunchly her image eschews the kind of grubby fingerwork of the corporate masseuse we see in many of her contemporaries; in oh-so-lightly-edited Substack posts she plays up her approachability, her willing descent from the stars back down to earth. Marx calls her a “pop rebel.” It’s hard to call it cynical, easy to call it “self-aware” and “too real.” Most of all it’s just naïve. Whatever chance there was that cool could coexist with corporate aesthetics, technology took up the scythe and laid it clean. If there are two things that are the antithesis of cool, it’s tech and corporations — which are our culture.
Perhaps the only thing giving them a run for their money are the insert pages of legacy media, of which W. David Marx is another oily product. Blank Space resounds with the thundering echo of the establishment, not only in the cultural products it references and tastefully readable voice it adopts (Dave Eggers, eat your heart out), but in the class of commentariat it seems to deem authoritative. Its touchstones are Gawker, The Face, Pitchfork, The Atlantic; NPR is sacred gospel. It quotes commentators with their titular qualifiers — “the internet culture critic Katherine Dee,” “novelist Will Leitch,” “political analyst John Ganz,” “journalist Marisa Meltzer” — to legitimize a class of culturati who we otherwise wouldn’t know, like, or care about. “The film critic A. S. Hamrah” (former stalwart of the hallowed pages of n+1) assures us that Hillbilly Elegy was considered “one of the worst films of the year by pretty much everybody who saw it,” and because he’s a film critic from n+1, we can believe him.
For many of us who no longer consider Pitchfork relevant or that writing a book about Sassy Magazine makes you a “journalist,” Blank Space reads like a ghost story, a white-on-white drawing, a genre tableau populated by nonentities. Marx’s appetite for pop culture may have predisposed him to research the 21st century, but his establishment rectitude makes him among the least prepared to understand it. Making clearheaded sense of Blank Space’s immense disparity of references would require, among other qualities, a stronghold philosophy or viewpoint — aestheticism, nihilism, spiritualism, anything will do really — buttressed by a sense of historical sweep, a knack for insight, and, if only for the reader’s pleasure, a decent aptitude for turning a fresh-sounding phrase. In other words, everything you’d never find in your weekly Vox newsletter. And if Marx didn’t learn to analyze, to write, or to come up with an assertive attitude, one can’t help but wonder what the four years at Harvard were for anyway.
Whatever wisdom Blank Space can muster is used up in its sections on fashion and Millennial malaise. The rest of the book quickly becomes a chore, all hyperbole and stiff-lipped liberal earnestness. Considering the cast of characters and events it assembles, Marx’s book is almost impossibly unfunny. Only when the humor almost writes itself can Marx generate a laugh, like when Paris Hilton names her two business idols — Trump and P. Diddy — or when, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Baz Luhrmann tries to meet the moment by fast-tracking his ridiculous Gatsby adaptation. Otherwise Blank Space goes by without a giggle, reminding us that if you’re not going to have a philosophy, you can at least have a sense of humour about it all.
The nearest Marx comes to an overarching principle is his kink for originality, but even then he’s more than a little flaccid. He is so ambulant is his terminology — “pure artistic innovation”? — that one begins to wonder if Marx might’ve benefited from a long evening with the Merriam Webster. Lengthily he expounds on the cultural impact of “manifesting, astrology, and other mystical practices,” movements that have been floating around Western consciousness for three quarters of a century and occupying a central position in Eastern life for millennia. On music, where he seems most keen to venture, Marx labels the balefully ordinary Chappell Roan a “daring new voice” but later completely misses on hyperpop, one of the very few uniquely 21st-century aesthetics, so that 100 gecs, who, all reservations aside, could reasonably be called “cultural inventors,” get one sentence in Marx’s “cultural history.” Perhaps he was warned off when he realized hyperpop hadn’t been covered in The Drift.
Strangest and most misbegotten of all is the book’s wonky scope. It may be that writing a book styled as a long-viewing chronicle yet only spanning 25 years discourages you from grasping a few hearty truths. A fuller context of human and especially art history might indicate, for example, that originality is startlingly rare and hardly the only sign of auspicious creative happenings. If originality, novelty, or “invention” were the hallmark of a blossoming culture, how many more than a handful of epochs, between the age of Aeschylus and the days of Delacroix, could be said to have reached their spring? Why, in other words, would we keep condemning ourselves to disappointment?
Ask your average Substacker and they’ll give you a Levitical tractus of reasons why they believe culture has come to its shuddering nadir: overexposure to the achievements of the past; the fatigue of content overload; a sense of all art and culture immediately drowning in its antecedents, giving everything the silvery smack of meaningless; a relentless pressure to keep releasing work, even if it’s not fully realized; a lack of cool; the total assimilation of art and commerce; and “social media” Most of it, naturally, has to do with the internet.
But the sense of a nadir — here I go with the time frames again — predates, by several decades even, the World Wide Web or the Commodore PET. In a 1959 interview with Georges Charbonnier, Claude Lévi-Strauss went on a lengthy and rather compelling fulmination against the paucity of the era’s cultural achievements. “We have reached a sort of impasse, and realized that we are tired of listening to the kind of music we have always listened to, looking at the kind of painting we are used to looking at every day and of reading books written according to the patterns we are familiar with. All this,” he said, “has given rise to a kind of unhealthy tension.” More depressing was how counterproductive our attempts to break the gridlock proved to be. Having become “too self-conscious” in our “determination to discover something new,” we had forgotten that these crises never, ever, find their saviors in “people . . . trying deliberately and systematically to invent new forms.” All efforts were not only futile — they were ruinous.
And yet somehow things feel worse today than ever. Lévi-Strauss, an art aficionado named after Claude Lorrain, looked back on the evolution pictorial art had undergone since his namesake’s epoch and yet could not, by 1959, see clearly whether it was a sign of construction or destruction. Now that question has been answered, resoundingly, in all art forms and media. Marx’s “blank space” has less to do with originality than it does the slow and systematic deconstruction of the boundaries we used to use to understand and classify art and culture: genres, disciplines, formats, institutions, and, most critically, standards of taste. This is what Marx calls “Cultural Omnivorism,” the total inverse of the old Greek derivation of critique — krisis — meaning choice.
The irony of Blank Space is that, generally, Marx’s own tendency is not omnivorous enough. His demonstrable preference for fashion and music prejudices him against other forms of cultural production which a 21st-century recapitulation ought to include. He’s mute on literary matters, glaringly apathetic to podcasts, and after claiming Vin Diesel “remained” at the end of the 2010s a “cultural fixture,” his curt glances at cinema feel mostly merciful. Given the attention he lends it, he seems to feel that music is the key to understanding the culture, but in his writing he shows almost no sensitivity for musical elements besides a beat, a lyric, a vibe. He chastises Lady Gaga for laundering conventional pop appeal through the illusion of “radical creativity” and a “glamorous, boundaryless life,” but sees nothing so suspicious in the “pioneering” achievement of “Old Town Road.”
Here Marx’s book concretizes one of many damning revelations about the current state of cultural commentary. Marx, and almost all of his media cohort, seem to be functionally art-illiterate. Weaned in the shallows of pop culture, the voices quoted in Blank Space take the kind of credulous approach to art and entertainment that belies a mind looking not for the subterranean spirit of a thing but for its baldest, most comprehensible “message.” Analyses of shows like Gossip Girl and Glee demonstrate a willingness to nourish oneself only on first-order interpretations, narratives, and characters being taken always for what they “represent.” Rich kids having fun means an endorsement of “aristocratic” politics, and queer romances and “subplots” featuring characters with Down syndrome “expand representation.” It’s undergraduate stuff, and the inverse of Marx’s intemperate cultural appetite: a short temper for the possibility of abstruse readings.
By the end of Blank Space, a flummoxed Marx, having persevered through the kampf of his diagnosis, tries to summon the clarity to recommend a few amelioratory avenues. Mostly he’s on point, especially when arguing that standards of judgment need to be reaffirmed and “critics and tastemakers” championed. “To have great poets,” wrote Whitman, “we must have great audiences,” and, as the book’s conclusory chapter reveals, W. David Marx agrees. But how hollow it all seems after almost 400 pages of his own aesthetic confusion and critical dilettantism.
Which is, in part, what makes Blank Space so infuriating and depressing. How will we ever extricate ourselves from this morass if we can’t name its form? Some generations ago it would have been unthinkable to analyze a Gothic church by focusing only on its pillars and windows. Now, matters of the spirit, the inchoate, have slipped into obsolescence; everything is rudimentary content, a bare-faced declaration of intent. The collapse of critical apparatuses is not excuse enough; we have also forsaken almost all critical faculties, educated our way out of them, sewn virtuous ideologies into our eyes instead, and finally convinced ourselves that taste with too high a brow is not democratic enough and that all preconceptions pale against the need to be inclusive. But who ever believed that true art, or cool, or vision was inclusive?
Call it an archive of ephemera, call it a survey of stagnation, but if it’s not a history of cultural aesthetics — how things look, sound, and present themselves — what is Blank Space but a history of cultural morals? If one sounds like a much more exhausting and hectoring experience than the other, let me assure you, it is. The incurable malady of Blank Space is its indifference to any distinction between the truths of life and the truths of art. That the two might be worth differentiating seemed more or less obvious to a few centuries of artists yet apparently didn’t occur to the author, nor the editor, nor the fact-checkers who brought us Blank Space. But it should have, because when the book inevitably finds its way to the really critical stuff, it is found utterly, brazenly wanting.
Here we come to the big two, the events that most devastated and revolutionized 21st-century culture: 9/11 and Trump — neither of which Marx seems, in any remote way, to “get.” His curious blindness to the impact of the first is an innocent foretaste of his willful blindness to the realities of the second, culminating in the reader’s dazed wonderment at the book’s end, at how someone so resolutely determined to ignore Trump could possibly believe he was ever qualified to interpret the 21st century.
But first came 9/11, which for many of us came to mind as our bloodthirst was being perturbingly sated by the death of Charlie Kirk, in what functionally amounted to a live-streamed assassination. Here, it was almost impossible not to think back to the glittering image of the world’s largest pair of towers, in the heart of the world’s most iconic skyline, exhaling their final sinister plumes. Warhol had prefigured it with his Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963): the voyeurism, the violence, the disgusting allure, which, just as it drew our eyes to the extraordinary terror of Flight 175, drew our gaze, a quarter-century later, to videos of Charlie Kirk’s murder or Vince Zampella’s fatal car crash. Violence we had seen, but nothing with the scale and definition of 9/11. Its dreadnought symbolism was broadcast everywhere, inescapable, in full color and in devastating detail, gawked over almost instinctively. All over, for free, horror in high-definition: this was the 21st century.
It seems bizarre and somewhat negligent to write a book about images, media, and commercialism, and to let 9/11 go almost entirely unmentioned. If the will to transgress got the better of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who called 9/11 the “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,” the heart of the statement — that 9/11 will live on as perhaps the most indelible, extraordinary image many of us will ever see — seems not without its prescience. Yet W. David Marx, with good right-thinking rectitude, quotes Stockhausen not to ponder the undercurrents of his assertion but to inform us that, in the wake of his utterance, all performances of his music were cancelled. Just as those who “‘got’ Pop . . . could never see America the same way again,” our culture divides between those who see the Warholian realism they’re living in and those who don’t. It’s all a bit lost on W. David Marx, who in 9/11 sees almost nothing and in Andy Warhol sees only the guy at the centre of a “downtown scene.”
Why Marx keeps his discursions on 9/11 tersely forgettable shortly becomes apparent: he was saving his ink for Trump, about whom the author has reams to say, all in the kind of language that recalls something of a Hollywood liberal righteousness and something of the CNN chyron. Those who get past the ladling of rhetorical platitudes one perhaps naively thought we’d moved on from — “decency and progress,” “dystopian absurdity,” “male-oriented ecosystems,” “steamrolling over ethics and morals” — are then greeted with every sort of woo-woo trick of discreditation and disrepute-by-association Marx can muster from the #NotMyPresident playbook. In two marathon chapters, one in the middle and another that provides the dénouement, he activates Deplorables mode in a tour de force of proper-noun accusation. Proud Boys, Pizzagate, Kanye, Bronze Age Pervert, Milo, Azealia Banks, Louis C.K., Kyle Rittenhouse, 4Chan, Peter Thiel, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Pepe, Martin Shkreli, Ariel Pink, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and “slovenly Steve Bannon” — this inculpation, the stuff of “Trumpism,” is just one great fetid lump of political excrement, which apparently, in the world according to W. David Marx, slid straight off the wall. “Despite wielding maximal political power,” he writes, “Trumpism struggled to make a cultural dent in the late 2010s.” It’s an extraordinary conclusion for a professional thinker to make, and one that, in light of Louis’ return from cancellation, the exporting of the edge-right’s conspiracism into the mainstream, the continued ascendancy of The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, or Peter Thiel’s associations first with the intellectual dark web and then with the Dimes Square mandarins, seems more than a little revisionist, and certainly less than candid.
Trump once said that Hilary didn’t have “the Presidential look,” a phrase which, like the Warholian litmus test, perfectly delineates the haves and have-nots in the Trumpian world. There are those of us who understand what Trump meant symbolically, and there are the W. David Marx’s, still taking every utterance literally, bloomers clasped in the name of “liberal decency,” a phrase Marx uses unironically. But then, it’s hard to see something clearly when you’re still in a state of shock about its happening. Marx has yet to quite accept the Trump paradigm — yet to “get Pop” — perhaps because he is still so blinded by a Trumpian aesthetic he finds barbarous and uncouth. It’s a downstream consequence of the incapability — here I go again — to separate aesthetics from ideology: the same incapability that made Pharrell offer an oleaginous mea culpa for his song “Blurred Lines,” which he “didn’t realize” had “catered to . . . chauvinist culture”; the same one that encouraged Vulture to conclude, apropos of Hamilton, that “in order to dislike it you’d pretty much have to dislike the American experiment.”
Naturally, Marx’s “conclusions” about Trumpian culture are a little askew; so too are his presuppositions. The jig is up as soon as he diagnoses Trump’s base as a group of people who merely want “higher cultural standing,” who, in other words, are just as culture-brained as Marx is and thus want only to be able to afford a shack in Santa Barbara and be “celebrated” for their love of Pabst Blue Ribbon and maybe permanently substitute Chappell Roan with Reba McEntire on the Billboard charts. Of course, all of this renders Marx hopelessly short-sighted about the nuances of post-Trumpian culture. Cancellation, for one, is a topic he doesn’t even bother thinking about, perhaps because it’s not culture like Charli xcx is culture. With a blithe equivocation he dismisses it as an age-old phenomenon, one that was just as active in the ’60s when record producers and film studio bosses practiced “cancellation by taste.” Later, in the backlash against Trump, Black Panther garnered guffaws from the critical establishment and made a billion dollars, which Marx predictably views as a triumphant demonstration of “the commercial and critical potential of progressive filmmaking.” Or, to put it in the Vulture formulation: to have an aesthetic or artistic problem with Black Panther, you’d pretty much have to dislike civil rights.
All of it smacks of that fungal, fetid, corrosive idea which got us here in the first place: that art’s job was not to make beauty but to make the world a better place. Not only is it tiresome beyond words, it’s a philosophy that has encouraged a class of over-educated, overly-online, virtuous “culture” journalists to pretend that using phrases like “progressive filmmaking” will take us anywhere. W. David Marx, who, in his desire to make culture new (again), ignores any separation between art and content, performative morality and true virtue, aesthetics and ideology, society and politics, imagined he was writing the great indictment of our inauspicious age. But in reality, no matter how justly he might castigate the moneymen and the fellow-travelers, he failed to wonder what his own part in the story might be. Blank Space should have been a book that helped us clear away the dead leaves and catch a glimpse of spring. Instead, the detritus seems as immovable as ever. For the moment, the rot remains.
Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist from Melbourne, Australia
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