Has 21st-century culture become too bland?

Music is blending into an algorithm-generated playlist, cinema is dominated by blockbuster movies from decades-old franchises, and the rest of the cultural scene is as flat and bland as a pancake.

That’s according to a new book, the “lucid and entertaining – yet despairing” “Blank Space”, by W. David Marx. In it, he argues that 21st-century culture has become an “enthusiastic embrace of selling out”, said The Minnesota Star Tribune. But has he missed the point?

‘Slurry of stagnation’

“Omnivorism” is “one of the primary culprits” that Marx identifies. When “country, R&B, hip-hop and classic rock become interchangeable bits to sample, rather than distinct musical styles”, then “nothing stands out”. He thinks “the understandable desire to cross musical boundaries in once-unthinkable ways has turned into a slurry of stagnation”.

Marx’s “key point about the bland sameness” of today’s art “will resonate with anybody who has a hard time remembering when a new song made them perk up, pay attention and realise they have never heard anything like that before”.

This century “looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering” one for culture since “the invention of the printing press”, said The New York Times Magazine in 2023. “Shockingly few works of art in any medium” have been “created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999”.

Misguided and oversimplified

Yes, it feels like there’s a “confounding glut of art”, but “little of the original, startling kind that matters”, said The Economist. Instead there’s “music without instruments and lyrics without meaning”, plus “endless reboots, sequels and superheroes in the cinema”.

But Marx’s “sweeping book oversimplifies a dizzyingly messy picture”, because some of his criticisms “could have been made in the past, and were”. So even if today’s “means of self-publicity are new”, the “attention-seeking grifters are not” and “there has always been more dross than gold”.

Marx’s argument is a “dated, misguided understanding of how history works”, said Art in America. It is “rooted in a 19th-century fallacy called positivism: the belief that history moves in a clean, linear progression of successive innovations”.

But “if history is any indicator”, those “still insisting culture is dead” will “go down” as “conservative curmudgeons very much on the wrong side of history”. You might “think writers so obsessed with the past would have learned as much”.