Are We Really in a Global Monoculture?

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.

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 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 extreme by proposing that contemporary global art and culture have dissolved into a “blank space”—an era defined by monocultural sameness, corporate cynicism, and artistic timidity.

It’s an alluringly simple story that surely appeals to anyone who has aimlessly scrolled through the spate of reality shows on Netflix or one of Spotify’s terrible robo-curated playlists of chill brunch music. But it’s increasingly absurd to talk about a global “monoculture” or “cultural stagnation” in a time of unprecedented cultural abundance and ease of access to art and entertainment from all over the world. In reality, we have never been further away from a monoculture.

A model walks the runway during a fashion show at McDonald’s during Paris Fashion Week on June 20, 2019.Victor Boyko/Getty Images

Taken on their own, many of the chapters in Blank Space are excellent as micro-histories of recent cultural phenomena. Marx has a rare ability to move seamlessly between descriptions of Japanese streetwear and literary theorist Fredric Jameson. The best chapter excoriates modern luxury brands, describing how companies once defined by craftsmanship, attention to detail, and local identity have been hollowed out by private equity and global conglomerates. They now chase lowest-common-denominator marketing strategies while raising prices and lowering quality.

It’s particularly laughable when prestige fashion brand Vetements defends one of its corporate collaborations with McDonald’s by calling the burger chain “the Louis Vuitton of food”—a perfect snapshot of an aesthetic nihilism that does feel contemporary and depressing. Marx is right to claim that this trend represents not a democratization of high culture, but rather the devaluation of luxury, a stripping away of specificity to satisfy global shareholder capitalism.

Blank Space could have been a great book if Marx had chosen to focus primarily on the corporate power of cynical conglomerates such as LVMH or U.S. streaming giants and their unhealthy role in contemporary culture. Indeed, it’s easy to sympathize with his demand for complex and challenging art at a time when many tech platforms foist mindless content on users.

Yet Marx overshoots with a broad conclusion that tarnishes all of global art and culture: “In reliving the first quarter of the century in these pages, we can feel what’s missing. … For all the energy invested in culture today, little has emerged that feels new at a symbolic level. Certainly, nothing radical enough to fully outmode the past.”

Marx effectively reduces global culture to a few examples lifted from a narrow slice of 21st-century U.S. culture, from crypto bros to Paris Hilton to the nihilist brigade running Vice magazine. He spends an entire chapter dwelling on Lady Gaga’s compromised artistic integrity and her banal corporate collaborations with the likes of Oreo cookies, arguing that she “augured how much commerce would go on to fully triumph over art.” But the chapter could just as well have celebrated the countless brilliant pop divas who restlessly push the boundaries of contemporary pop music, from Rosalía to Rihanna to Robyn.

It is also perplexing to generalize about “culture” as though billions of people share the same reality. A British TV critic may lament that “irony is dead” after watching a bad sitcom, but why would that mean anything in Delhi, Lagos, Santiago, or Seoul, which have their own cultural ecosystems? We can whine about Hollywood franchises and unimaginative sequels and prequels, but China, India, and South Korea all have movie industries that rival that of the United States.

There has never been a more diverse range of cultural options for people around the world to choose from. We live in a time when global audiences can admire politically minded Chinese artists such as Jia Zhangke and Ai Weiwei; Han Kang wins literary awards for delving into the darkest moments of modern South Korean history; and survivors of bombings in Gaza and Ukraine write poems that depict the most intimate experiences of terror. Marx claims that risk is no longer rewarded in contemporary culture, but look at the tiny British publishing house Fitzcarraldo, which has consistently chosen risk-taking authors over safe commercial ones; these writers have been rewarded with four Nobel Prizes in 10 years: Svetlana Alexievich (2015), Olga Tokarczuk (2018), Annie Ernaux (2022), and Jon Fosse (2023).

Princess Anne (left) chats with Motown group the Supremes after a performance in London in 1968. Keystone via Getty Images

Marx turns to a familiar cohort of pessimists in an attempt to show that past generations predicted the malaise of our current era: Jean Baudrillard, David Foster Wallace, Neil Postman, Christopher Lasch, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson (you might see a demographic pattern here), all quoted for their supposedly remarkable foresight. But they were writing their screeds in other decades, precisely in those days that men of my generation tend to see as the golden age of human creativity, be it the 1990s or the 1970s—whenever New York was supposedly cooler than it is today, some bygone time of decent cocktails and Patti Smith and Basquiat hanging out at loft parties.

Marx goes all the way back to 1962, when Daniel Boorstin wrote The Image, a classic work of cultural criticism and media studies, to make the convoluted argument that Boorstin somehow predicted the shallowness of contemporary celebrity culture. Marx writes, “For Boorstin, the twentieth century marked the fall of a golden age of heroes to the hollow triumph of the celebrity—‘a person who is known for his well-knownness.’ Despite his critique, celebrity culture only accelerated throughout the century, fueled by the growth of mass media.”

Sure, Boorstin may be eerily prescient, but more likely his writing just reveals that this sentiment is timeless: Well-read critics are forever writing nostalgic complaints about the unique dumbness of the culture of their own time.

In 1966, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys sang, “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.” In hindsight, 1966 seems to be exactly the time that Wilson was made for: It was objectively one of the greatest years in the history of innovative pop music, with the Beatles, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown all dropping classic albums, while John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich radically invented new forms of composition. And yet, here was Wilson, the pop genius, sad that things didn’t feel as cool as before. The song itself, of course, is a timeless masterpiece, an ode to this vague nostalgia and alienation and perhaps an implied sense of cultural superiority.

So it’s worth remembering that even during the peak of the 1960s wave of radically new cultural expression, people still whined that music wasn’t as fun as it used to be. Pete Townshend, the leader of British rock band the Who, dismissed the Beach Boys’ entire masterpiece Pet Sounds (including “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”) as an album “written for a feminine audience.”

Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson directs from the control room while recording the album Pet Sounds in Los Angeles in 1966.Michael Ochs Archives/via Getty Images

Of course, Huysmans was writing this in the 1880s, during the French Belle Époque, possibly the greatest era of cultural innovation that humankind has ever witnessed. Around him, Paris was teeming with artistic and scientific genius: Émile Zola, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, Claude Debussy, Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim. Yet Huysmans was convinced that culture was dying, that contemporary art was empty, that true intellectual society was fading into the mist.

If anything, the most widely discussed screeds against cultural decline tend to be timed, with almost surgical precision, for publication exactly when culture is at its most vibrant.