In 2024, a study from the opinion research firm YouGov revealed that Americans of every generation could only agree on one thing: Art and culture were more fun when they were in high school. It didn’t matter whether this happened to be in 1968, 1988, or 2008. The point was that culture simply felt a bit more thrilling when many of them personally happened to be in their late teens.

The YouGov study is not quoted in cultural critic W. David Marx’s new book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, but it might explain its existence. For men of my generation, born in the 1970s and 1980s—currently unavoidable as thought leaders—there seems to be an overwhelming feeling of cultural decline over the past two decades, concurrent with an understanding that culture simply peaked in the late 1990s. So it’s no coincidence that we’re now seeing many books, essays, and hot takes, almost exclusively written by men of this generation, arguing that art and culture just don’t feel cool anymore.

In 2024, a study from the opinion research firm YouGov revealed that Americans of every generation could only agree on one thing: Art and culture were more fun when they were in high school. It didn’t matter whether this happened to be in 1968, 1988, or 2008. The point was that culture simply felt a bit more thrilling when many of them personally happened to be in their late teens.

The YouGov study is not quoted in cultural critic W. David Marx’s new book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, but it might explain its existence. For men of my generation, born in the 1970s and 1980s—currently unavoidable as thought leaders—there seems to be an overwhelming feeling of cultural decline over the past two decades, concurrent with an understanding that culture simply peaked in the late 1990s. So it’s no coincidence that we’re now seeing many books, essays, and hot takes, almost exclusively written by men of this generation, arguing that art and culture just don’t feel cool anymore.

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, W. David Marx, Viking, 384 pp., $32, November 2025

In a telling sentence from Blank Space, Marx writes, “Audrey Hepburn, Miles Davis, and Joan Didion remain iconic because no one has emerged who can compete with their cool.” The idea is that nothing truly interesting or radical has happened in culture for the past few decades.

In his previous work, the occasionally brilliant Status and Culture, Marx argued that the internet’s frictionless distribution of goods and information had devalued culture by stripping away scarcity and elevating money and audience numbers to the ultimate status symbols. It’s an interesting thesis that he now pushes to the........

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