Cheekily titled after one of Taylor Swift’s biggest hits, Blank Space is an attempt by culture writer W. David Marx to do something extremely ambitious in an extremely compact package: a 375-page (with endnotes!) capsule summary of the entirety of global culture over the past 25 years.

Despite the book’s sprawl, Marx offers a straightforward thesis: Culture, once the purview of innovators who pushed society forward with their insight, transgression, and innovation, now serves “merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics,” with “a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” (Emphasis his)

An honest reader would be hard-pressed to disagree with this conclusion, especially in the face of the shrill insistence from some quarters that AI-generated slop and puerile TikTok trends represent the next step in the tradition that gave us the Book of Psalms, “The Rite of Spring,” and the third act of “Boogie Nights.” But a book that dares to upend the received wisdom of the age needs a more coherent, compelling argument than the one Marx has to offer.

Marx careens from popular music to reality television to fashion, with a special emphasis on the latter (he sits on the board of directors of the Japanese streetwear brand Human Made, which goes oddly unmentioned as he waxes rhapsodic about the brand’s founder and fashion kingpin Nigo). The book’s vast scope gives his descriptions of recent events a disorienting, grocery-list quality, reminiscent of the at-first-glance meaningless “cruft” that populates the mega-novels of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace — even as he largely ignores fields such as film, television, and literature.  

Surrendering to the forces of........

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