The Yale Review | Audrey Wollen: “Is the Twenty-First Century a…

The Yale Review

Subscribe<br>Donate

Books

Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?

Critics mourn a bygone cultural era. But nostalgia for the new isn't new.

Audrey Wollen

Some of the past century's heights of ingenuity were built from the recycled and the restaged, Audrey Wollen writes—like Louise Lawler's photographs of artworks on the walls of auction houses. Louise Lawler, Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry?, 1988. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers

You could be forgiven for thinking things—art, books, music, clothes—were irretrievably dire. Almost a decade ago, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that “culture appears more monolithic than ever. . . . Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.” In a 2023 piece in The New York Times Magazine, Jason Farago claimed: “We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” A headline last year at The Atlantic read: “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” New York recently released “The Stupid Issue,” asking, “Is 2025 the stupidest year on record?” and answering with “12 signs of a culture in decline,” in the same listicle format often blamed for dwindling journalistic standards.

Apparently, I’ve been living in this arid desert of innovation for my entire adolescence and adult life. In 2011, the year I turned nineteen, the music critic Simon Reynolds made the following diagnosis in his book Retromania: “Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.” In 2014, in the introduction to his influential essay collection Ghosts of My Life, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, “It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised—not in the far distant future, but very soon—as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.” (An odd claim, as the 1950s saw the birth of rock and roll in the United States, major breakthroughs in jazz, and Singin’ in the Rain.)

“very soon” has arrived, the simultaneity of time notwithstanding, inaugurated by W. David Marx’s recent book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, which aims to historicize the years from 2000 to 2025 as a period of creative emptiness and stagnation so intractable that it will be remembered (or, rather, is being remembered, through the anticipation of remembrance) as voided time, a dark age. Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred.

In his closing chapter, Marx writes, “Culture has been central to the narrative of the last twenty-five years—but merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics. In reliving the first quarter of the century in these pages, we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” It is, by its own admission, history presented as negative-space drawing: if you write down all the “entertainment, commerce, and politics,” the absent shape of “art” might become visible. Art evades definition—you’ll know it when you (don’t) see it.

No one could argue that people are making less of it, as this is also an era defined by unprecedented access to the tools of production and distribution. The means to edit a short film, design a poster, or record an album in your bedroom, and then publish that work directly to an audience, are newly affordable and widespread. For Marx, however, most of that creation (or should we call it content?) is not creativity; it is a surplus of material, propelled and inhibited by a wish to make money and gain attention. Poptimism—the idea that commercial pop should be accorded the same critical attention as traditionally “serious” genres such as rock or jazz—has wrenched away our critical ability to assess something’s worth outside of metrics defined by mass-market success: if it makes money, it must be good. (I would argue that the floundering of critical thinking in public life, and of criticism as a professional practice, is not due to the scholarly appreciation of Mariah Carey songs, but that is a minor point.)

If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh.

According to Marx, nothing “feels new” or “radical enough to...