Culture wars across the centuries remarkably alike

Two well-researched new books take hard looks at capitalism's effects on the arts.

- Review MARK ATHITAKIS

W. David Marx's doom-scroll through 21st century pop culture, "Blank Space," is largely a catalog of cringe.

Kardashians keep barging in, joined by Paris Hilton, Milo Yiannopoulos, MAGA-hatted trolls, latter-day Hitler enthusiast Kanye West and more. The collection of Z-listers in the book runs so deep that there's no room for even some of the most infamous Kevin Feder-line-level hacks to fit into its pages. In Marx's reckoning, we've lived with 25 years of mediocrity, with no end in sight. Couture is now fast fashion. Art is IP, AI, the MCU and NFTs. Patronage has become grift.

"Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a blank space," Marx writes. Yes, he's side-eyeing Taylor Swift, or at least her savvy-bordering-on-cynical approach to fandom. The title of the book, after all, is a nod to one of her hits. This might seem like get-off-my-lawn grousing from a critic who misses the good old days. But Marx's critique isn't rooted in pop culture preferences so much as concern with the ruthless ways that capitalism and the internet have manipulated the way we consume, discuss and make use of the arts. Algorithms engineered for sameness and profit have effectively sidelined provocation. Revanchist conservatism, he suggests, has rushed to fill the vacuum.