How the 21st Century Broke Culture

0:02David Marx:I'm Naomi Rae, Editor-in-Chief of Artnet News. In a confusing art world, it's not always clear how much art is really worth. Why only some people get visibility, or who is bending the truth? Artnet Pro is funded by subscribers, so we work for you. Our job is to cut through the spin and report independently on the forces shaping the art market. To support art journalism that delivers serious insights that you can trust, sign up at news.artnet.com forward slash subscribe. And to those of you who already do, thank you.

0:55differences, different styles, new ways of doing things, new values.

1:03I'm Kate Brown, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

1:14The first quarter of the 21st century is over. What just happened? A major strand of discussion, at least in the cultural sphere, has emerged about a pervasive sense of ennui, for one thing, a feeling that creative invention in culture has stagnated. W. David Marks' new book, Blank Space, A Cultural History of the 21st Century, is an incisive guide through the cultural touchstones that define the last quarter century, and he examines how commercialization came to dominate contemporary culture, propagated by technological advances and a changing cultural mindset. Marks argues that the rise of profit-driven formulas in various cultural industries paired with these technological shifts had a stimming effect on culture, causing the last 25 years to be some of the least innovative and the least transformative since the invention of the printing press.

1:58He has some ideas about how we can claw our way back to a society that champions cultural inventiveness. For those who don't already know, Marx is a Tokyo-based American culture and fashion writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, among other publications. He's also the author of several books, including Status and Culture, How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, and Amatora, How Japan Saved American style. Hi, David. It's great to have you on. Hey, how are you? I'm good. I just finished your book, which I really enjoyed.

2:30And I have to admit at the top, I found myself stopping and starting it quite frequently because your storytelling got me very excited about so many songs, cultural figures, and reference points I'd forgotten about. Like I was listening to Grindin' by Clips a few times on repeat. Right. I mean, what's great about doing cultural histories today is that you can actually just go look up the songs that people mentioned or go watch the films or the TV shows. I remember reading Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds, which is like the cultural history of techno and electronic music in the late 90s. And every time he'd mentioned a song, it would just be like, that seems nice.

3:03And now, you know, with YouTube, you could actually go and listen to every single one as you read along. And I think that that like frictionlessness of being able to look into archives maybe ties into some of the things we'll be talking about today. But, you know, I'd like to start with just asking you, what prompted you to write a short history of the last 25 years, effectively? So it came out of two places. I mean, the first was my last book, Status and Culture, was about the general and universal principles of how culture forms out of the interaction of people and really looking at that angle of social hierarchy as a driving engine for cultural change.

3:38And at the end of it, I examined the role of the internet and changing a lot of the parameters of how culture is made to solve this issue that people have been talking about, which is why does culture feel like it's stagnating? And we can debate whether it is stagnating or we just feel like it. But that was a pretty short chapter. And I felt like there's a lot more to say about what's going on right now. And what I noticed was that no one had really done a straight cultural history and straight as in linear cultural history of the 21st century or the 2000s or the 2010s. And we were up to 2025 and there was really no stopping to say, okay, what were the 2000s like the way that we used to look at the 80s and the 90s?

4:21And so I felt like it was just a good time that maybe those 25 years felt like a blur, but we should at least stop and look at the major cultural changes that had happened. And I had been reading Chuck Kosterman's The 90s, and he had talked about grunge and selling out and some of these things that were very 90s. And he had mentioned Pearl Jam and reminded me that they stopped making music videos. And when I went back to think about that, that this band had gotten very big very quickly, and they decided we're not going to make music videos, and they held to this promise for about 10 years, it just seems so alien to today's culture that the idea that you wouldn't just try to maximize how much money you make and how big you are and how popular you are.

5:02And so it felt like, okay, well, that's a pretty legitimate value shift that we've seen in the last 30 years. So there must be things we can chart in those 25 years, not just chronologically like this happened and this happened, but really try to get to the root of what 21st century culture has been like. And so I had the opportunity to do this. I had to write it very quickly in 11 months, which I would not recommend to anybody trying to do a book like that in a short amount of time. And also because the election of 2024 was happening as I was writing it, I kind of didn't know how it would end until the election.

5:35And so the last part of the book kind of came together very quickly. But in general, I mean, what I feel like it's useful is to be something that explains how people felt about this 25 years right after it happened. But I look forward to future cultural histories that go back and understand it from a maybe wider time angle and perspective. But this at least gives us a sense of writing down what we think is important at the moment. Well, it's an ambitious undertaking given, as you mentioned, the timeline, but also this particular quarter century, you know, to use the well-used quote, like the old world dying, the new one yet to be born, the time of monsters.

6:12I mean, it's been a very messy era. You fly over many culture industries, music in particular, but you also touch on art and fashion and the film industry. And, you know, on the whole, we get the sense that there's more culture being produced, more content being produced than ever before, to say nothing of AI-generated content, which we don't have time to touch on today. But on the human front, there are so many artists and cultural producers. So someone argued that we are in a more creative society that is more democratic. And yet, as you say, we have this feeling of cultural stagnation. And it's been a realm that art critics and culture critics have really been debating, especially in the last five years.

6:51So what is going on here? Like, we have more creative producers than ever before. And yet it feels like innovation is not happening. Right. So when people say culture is dead, I think that's the wrong way to look at it and the wrong adjective or the wrong metaphor, because there's more cultural activity, as you said, than ever before. And there's more people creating culture than ever before. It's just simply that culture is mostly doing three things, which is that it's made for the purpose of entertainment and distraction. It is made for profit, for making people a lot of money. And it is made as a political tool.

7:27And so if you look at most of the culture made in the 21st century, it is more verging towards that. And the difference for the 20th century was that there were artists and subcultures and countercultures who were very focused on culture as an activity of difference. in the sense of that artists were going to create new ways of whatever their format was, whether it's film or painting, that would expand the potential of that format and ultimately expand the human perspective and the human mind. Art subcultures and countercultures are rejecting the conventional mainstream styles and sounds and making their own in order to create their own community based around these different values.

8:18And so you had these people who were rejecting what was going on and really focusing on culture as the ultimate goal of their activity. And so I think what's happening now is you have lots and lots of people making things. There's no question of creativity is simply just the act of making something. More people are making things than ever before. But the thing we look back on when we look at a culture and we get a sense of cultural health or we get a sense of, you know, is culture progressing? We're looking for those differences, different styles, new ways of doing things, new values. And so if everyone's just kind of going out there and making culture that is political or to make money or just for entertainment distraction, it's very likely to be quite similar to culture in the past.

8:59And that means that things feel like they're stagnating because you don't have that sense of, wow, there's something truly new. It could be new in just the most basic superficial level as it's not like the thing right before it, but it's not fundamentally different than what came before in the way that rock music was different than jazz or hip-hop was different than rock. Trap music is probably a pretty good example of where things did radically change, that hip-hop just sounds different than it did before. But for a lot of culture in the 21st century, it has not changed that much. And people really are also living in a way in which they're consuming things from now and before and things from 10 years ago don't feel as alien as they would have in the 80s, 80s things during the 90s.

9:43Yeah. So it's not really a crisis of overproduction as much as it's a crisis of values. And you touched on this with the Pearl Jam reference, you know, this ethos of not wanting to sell out, which as your book guides us through, you chart how that became increasingly okay to the point that creativity and commerce are completely fused now. Can you speak a bit about how this happened. And, you know, I'm curious how kitsch and nostalgia folds into that, because over the last two decades and a half, we have become increasingly nostalgic for past times. And there's been, you know, the stranger things effect on all aspects of culture.

10:22Yeah. So in terms of commerce and culture, if you go back to the 20th century and you think about the avant-garde mindset, that you have a vanguard of people who are creating new forms of art that radically disrupt the expectations of art that are in people's brains. And they know that they're not going to be popular by doing this because people want what they expect. And so there became an idea that obviously, if you're the most radical avant-garde artist, you're not going to be commercially successful because the market is based off of lowest common denominator tastes, et cetera, et cetera. And so there was always a distrust of the market and distrust of commerce.

10:58If you were someone who cared a lot about artistic integrity and pushing art forward or alternative music or indie music or all these things. And there was a flip in the 21st century where it's not simply greed. And I think this is what's really important. It's not that we all got greedy and we only care about money. It's that there became a lot of suspicion around artistic excellence and artistic intention as a form of elitism and the sense of if you believe that there's a high culture and a low culture and that high culture is better than low culture, then you are being very disrespectful to the people who can maybe not understand high culture and get a lot of value out of low culture and kitsch.

11:42And so kitsch is a word that's used in art theory, not to mean bad art or lower quality art. It just means cultural products that conform to existing conventions, that conform to stock emotions and the way things that are always done. And so the difference between art and kitsch is that art was breaking those conventions and kitsch was conforming to them. But if you're now in a world in which we are worried about the inclusivity, if we start saying kitsch is not as valuable as art, then that one factor of what makes art and kitsch different, which is the invention versus convention side, becomes an irrelevant conversation.

12:23And so as we start not caring as much about that distinction, that obviously art that's made to be commercial, to appeal to the most people as possible, should be taken as seriously as art that's meant for a small audience or meant to be quite difficult. And so a lot of these barriers towards commerce were being eroded, not just from the market and not just from people who want to make a lot of money, but members of the cultural community themselves. I think that's been a really big shift that explains the open door to commerce. And then second is that open door to kitsch. And, you know, nostalgia is also quite interesting because a lot of kids who are watching Stranger Things don't understand it from the perspective of nostalgia, since they didn't grow up in the 80s playing Dungeons and Dragons and watching all these movies.

13:12But there's a general sense that the movies from the 80s, like a Star Wars or E.T., are iconic in a way that movies today are not. And so there's something about that era that Stranger Things portrays that's become crystallized even today as being more valuable than the cultural world that we live in. So Simon Reynolds talks about Retromania. He has a book called that from 2011, one of the first people to really see what was going on in terms of culture being stuck. But I think the point is that we go back to these previous trends, not simply out of sense of nostalgia that I grew up on it, I want to experience it again, but just that the culture of the past is more valuable than the culture of the present because of all these technological and economic and cultural factors.

13:55I know that I'm supposed to have one really easy answer in order to be on the lecture circuit and be endlessly quoted, but the problem is this is really, really complicated and there are multiple factors kind of all playing together. And in the book, I try to tease them out and go through them. But in general, just the economy and technology and our cultural values have all shifted to focus on a certain worldview. And unfortunately, that makes the past look more attractive than the present. Yeah. And you have a great quote, which is that kitsch never asks us to change. And I was thinking about that.

14:29And as you mentioned, you know, nostalgia, it exists in a lot of contemporary art at the moment, you see homages to earlier artists, and they're often done under the auspices of critical revisions, which, you know, are sometimes successful, but they are not inherently successful or inherently critical or inventive. So there is something interesting about the idea of a remix and that it's not always creating anything new at all. Now, you mentioned something about high culture and low culture just now, and you bring up this term cultural omnivorism in the book. And then maybe this is a way to get to the sort of first era, because of course, you've broken up the last quarter century into four quarters.

15:04And from 2001 to 2008, you touch on the sort of advent of the cultural omnivore. Could you speak a bit about what this is? Cultural omnivorism really starts in the 90s. It's a term from that era of sociologists, where it used to be that if you were in a certain socioeconomic class, especially towards the top, you would mostly be consuming high culture. And then there was middle-brow culture and low culture. And so these were all class stratified. And what they noticed is that people in the upper middle classes or knowledge workers or creative class, whatever you want to call them, were proudly consuming low culture and especially kind of pluralistic, global, low culture, ethnic foods and fun things from around the world as much as they were consuming difficult art, difficult films.

15:49And so this became the idea of omnivorism, which is that you're going to consume high and low. And I think in general, this is a really positive thing because if you're a cultural omnivore, it just means every day you wake up and you have more things to consume. you can value more things, you have more perspective. And it's also just generally more acceptance of how other people live. Like if you can understand great cuisine from all these different cultures, it's much more likely you understand that your culture is not the only correct one and that there's other ways people can live. So it's part of being a cosmopolitan liberal person to be a cultural omnivore.

16:24That then extends in the 21st century to a term that's a little bit controversial and people don't love it, but it's called poptimism. I think this is kind of the best way to describe it, which is to then say, okay, if there's really no difference between high and low, then we should treat pop music and manufactured pop and things that are really made for the market, not just the commercialized in the market. We should treat them as seriously as we treat things that are made with artistic intent. And so if Ashley Simpson gets caught lip syncing, to disqualify her as being inauthentic is very unfair because culture that's made from the market means that people sometimes need to have their voices repitched, or they need all these kind of studio tricks, and maybe they can't sing live.

17:13So we should really treat all this pop culture as being as legitimate as non-pop culture. And from there, then you kind of just start getting some other ideas that are auxiliary to it, which is, well, if it's popular, it means more people like it, and therefore it's an even more legitimate form of culture than elitist high culture would be, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that it's one of these kind of slippery slopes where omnivorism starts from the perspective of just let's stop discriminating against people for their cultural taste, and let's try to enjoy everything. And then poptimism is saying let's really reinforce that at a critical level and make sure that we're giving critical attention to both things that are made to be sold and things that are made maybe for more artistic purposes.

17:54And then to the degree that it really moves to what I call ultra-poptimism, where a lot of fans, let's say stans of Taylor Swift or Nicki Minaj, are really outraged when anybody criticizes their idol because their idea is, if we love them, then you must respect the fact that we love them and recognize our tastes. And so any kind of cultural critique against popular artist is in some ways an anti-democratic move in itself. And so these ideas of inclusion really get played out in the 21st century and go in somewhat extreme directions. And at the moment, I mean, we certainly just do not live in a world in which there is any kind of hierarchy between high and low, and it's not a really useful way of looking at the world.

18:39And I think there's people who certainly will say the idea of a high and low culture is not great to start with. And I really loathe those terms personally, because high most definitely suggests that somebody who likes high culture is a better person than someone who likes low culture. But there is a difference between what art is doing and what Kitsch is doing. And I think that has been lost in the wash as we think about this kind of question of ondivoreism. And then, of course, there were real political consequences to that, which you highlight in the book, that the kind of idea of counterculture arises again, but it arises on the right.

19:12But importantly, the right doesn't really create cultural innovation either. Can you get into that a little bit? So I would say for most of the last couple centuries, the political right has not been a major source of artistic innovation. And there are some exceptions maybe in the early 20th century where you look at the Italian futurists and, you know, Ezra Pound, and some of these people were supporters of fascism, and you can kind of argue narrowly that there was something going on there, or T.S. Eliot was quite conservative politically. But really, there was an idea in the avant-garde community that what artists were doing was expanding the potential of art, and in doing so, it expanded the potential of the human mind and opened the human mind.

20:00And that was a very liberal progressive idea. And I think that art has been fundamental to pushing these cosmopolitan values in the sense that if you understand that there's different ways that we can see the world and there's different ways in which things can be created, which I think is one of the key goals of art, then you can understand how people feel around the world and how different cultures work and understand and accept those cultures. And so I think in general that creative invention has been mostly on the left for a very long time. And the right was just not that interested. And so much of conservatism was literally conservative in the idea of being a parochial culture of, this is the way it used to be, it needs to be this way, or provincial culture of, the way that we live is the only right way and that everyone else is wrong.

20:50And so those are not conducive to artistic creation and that they're not focused on it because they're focused on keeping things the way they are. When you get to the 21st century, so much of consumer culture had become about transgression. And that transgression was left-wing for a very long time because mainstream culture had a conservative core to it and had that parochial core to it. And once culture became more liberal and progressive, as in mainstream culture and mainstream politics, then the transgressive position began to be to fight against that and to think that things like political correctness is massively oppressive.

21:29And so you get first, let's say, Gavin McInnes at Vice Magazine, who's using semi-ironically racial slurs or a lot of bigoted phrases in order to be provocative and outrageous. You see the same kind of thing on 4chan. And then that moves to what we see now with the manosphere, canceled people and the kind of what Max Reed calls this internet, which is like a vaguely right-wing conservative online community. But you get a sense that this is a slightly or extremely politically conservative side, but they're not interested in artistic innovation. That's just not what their goal is. And a lot of what they create is propaganda or it's transgressive and it's against what they perceive to be the enemy, which is the kind of liberal nanny state or the liberal hegemony.

22:18So everything flipped, But, you know, the way that the 60s counterculture, you can go look back and say, well, that was a massively creative couple of years in terms of aesthetics and music. And the music of the counterculture sounds completely different than music that came before. I think you just can't point to this, what I call the countercounterculture, this right wing counterculture as being any kind of creative force. But I would argue that the conservatives in this kind of conservative in particular has never really done that in the past either.

22:53You know, one of the most persuasive parts of the book is where you bring poptimism, which you've just defined, into the realm of virtual platforms. And what happens there is that culture, you can really like put metrics to it and you sort of call this like ultra poptimism. So that's something that in the art world we have really experienced as well. We have so much data on what people are looking at, why they're looking at it. And it's had this feedback loop with creators, right? They're starting to like feed into this process. Well, if I just tack this way, you know, I'll get more visibility.

23:27And I'd like to talk to you about that a bit. What has metrics done to cultural invention? Because it seems like virality has created a real vacuum of invention. Yeah, I mean, my perspective on art and culture is very much about not thinking about the cultural product as simply this thing that exists with intrinsic value. Like this is a film and it's a good film and this is a song and it's a good song, but really thinking about it in its entire context. And that context is also how other people think about it and what's come before and after it and everything about that cultural artwork. And what's going on online and we really can't escape is that almost every piece of content we consume has some sort of numerical signal that's attached to it.

24:21And so obviously, if you're looking at a YouTube video, you're going to see how many views there are. and Spotify will give you a sense of how many listens or whether an artist is subscribed to. Substack does this too. So everything kind of has this. Twitter X now has it where it actually gives you the view count for an actual tweet, but you know, you had before that likes and comments and retweets. Even if you don't want to follow these numbers that you believe, like, I just like this video. I don't care how many people have seen it. It just infects our judgment. Think about it this way as a thought experiment.

24:53If someone were to send you, you got to see this video and you opened it up and it had 48 views, you'd be like, why am I watching this? There's only 48 views for this video. And mostly what we expect, if someone says, you've got to watch this, it would have some high view count because it'd be a sign that other people have seen the value in it. This is a good example of not where we want our values to shift in this direction or that we're all out there saying, I only watch videos with 10 ,000 views. I've never met somebody who actually has this metric in their head, but we just absorb the logic of the platforms into how we make these judgments.

25:30And unfortunately, the context of these different artworks or cultural products or whatever you want to call them is within these platforms and it's in that logic. And so it gets all sucked into it. So I think it's really difficult to, for example, be a young artist. artist and even if you're an artist with a lot of critical appraisal or let's say only 20 people know your work but it's the right 20 people it's very hard to quantify that today in a way that you could show to somebody and say this is why i'm important and i think one of the things about the 20th century is it's not that it was unquantified and there were still you know measures it's just that it was imperfectly quantified so you can always imagine that something that was very good but unpopular, was popular with the right people, or had some sort of other intangible metric to it that made you still believe that it's important.