W. David Marx joins Artnet News senior editor Kate Brown on the podcast 'The Art Angle' to discuss his new book, *Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century*. The book argues that creativity across art, media, and popular culture has stagnated over the past 25 years, driven by commercialization, rapid technology shifts, and a preference for profit-driven formulas over experimentation. Marx identifies a 'conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be' and proposes five strategies to revive cultural inventiveness.
This matters because it offers a critical framework for understanding the current cultural moment, directly engaging with the visual art world's own concerns about innovation, market pressures, and the dominance of nostalgia and kitsch. By linking art to broader cultural trends in music, film, and fashion, Marx's analysis provides context for debates about creativity and originality that are central to contemporary art criticism and practice.