(Roughly) Daily

Critics mourn a bygone cultural era. But, as Audrey Wollen reminds us, nostalgia for the new isn’t new…

You could be forgiven for thinking things—art, books, music, clothes—were irretrievably dire. Almost a decade ago, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that “culture appears more monolithic than ever. . . . Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.” In a 2023 piece in The New York Times Magazine, Jason Farago claimed: “We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” A headline last year at The Atlantic read: “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” New York recently released “The Stupid Issue,” asking, “Is 2025 the stupidest year on record?” and answering with “12 signs of a culture in decline,” in the same listicle format often blamed for dwindling journalistic standards.

Apparently, I’ve been living in this arid desert of innovation for my entire adolescence and adult life. In 2011, the year I turned nineteen, the music critic Simon Reynolds made the following diagnosis in his book Retromania: “Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.” In 2014, in the introduction to his influential essay collection Ghosts of My Life, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, “It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised—not in the far distant future, but very soon—as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.” (An odd claim, as the 1950s saw the birth of rock and roll in the United States, major breakthroughs in jazz, and Singin’ in the Rain.)

“Very soon” has arrived, the simultaneity of time notwithstanding, inaugurated by W. David Marx’s recent book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, which aims to historicize the years from 2000 to 2025 as a period of creative emptiness and stagnation so intractable that it will be remembered (or, rather, is being remembered, through the anticipation of remembrance) as voided time, a dark age. Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred.

In his closing chapter, Marx writes, “Culture has been central to the narrative of the last twenty-five years—but merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics. In reliving the first quarter of the century in these pages, we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” It is, by its own admission, history presented as negative-space drawing: if you write down all the “entertainment, commerce, and politics,” the absent shape of “art” might become visible. Art evades definition—you’ll know it when you (don’t) see it.

No one could argue that people are making less of it, as this is also an era defined by unprecedented access to the tools of production and distribution. The means to edit a short film, design a poster, or record an album in your bedroom, and then publish that work directly to an audience, are newly affordable and widespread. For Marx, however, most of that creation (or should we call it content?) is not creativity; it is a surplus of material, propelled and inhibited by a wish to make money and gain attention. Poptimism—the idea that commercial pop should be accorded the same critical attention as traditionally “serious” genres such as rock or jazz—has wrenched away our critical ability to assess something’s worth outside of metrics defined by mass-market success: if it makes money, it must be good. (I would argue that the floundering of critical thinking in public life, and of criticism as a professional practice, is not due to the scholarly appreciation of Mariah Carey songs, but that is a minor point.)

According to Marx, nothing “feels new” or “radical enough to outmode the past,” resulting in a terrible state of affairs in which “Audrey Hepburn, Miles Davis, and Joan Didion remain iconic because no one has emerged who can compete with their cool.” Yet it is the narration and re-narration of Hepburn’s, Davis’s, and Didion’s “cool” that cements them so firmly in our firmament. Not only have all three appeared in mainstream fashion campaigns in the past twenty years (the Gap, Supreme, and Celine, respectively), but each has been the subject of a full-length documentary in the past ten (Audrey, 2020; Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, 2019; Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, 2017), and at least one major book about each has been released in the past five (Intimate Audrey, 2026, by Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Wendy Holden; 3 Shades of Blue, by James Kaplan, and Didion & Babitz, by Lili Anolik, both 2024). To allow others to “compete,” the cultural historians of the recent past would have to find something to historicize other than the current generation’s perceived inadequacy.

History, as usual, presents a Goldilocks problem—never “just right,” it is always ballooning into overwhelming excess, filling up the room and weighing down the present, or deflating into a slippery pellicular film, impossible to handle or understand. Popular internet discourse delivers jokes about millennials “watching their 173rd once-in-a-lifetime historical event unfold,” as one recent meme put it, as though my generation suffers from too much history, a “too much” that also signifies the end of itself, like the home of a hoarder that has accumulated so many mountains of life detritus that it ceases to function as a place where a person can live. This surplus of past in our everyday lives, which Reynolds has dubbed our retromania, is eased by the flattened, instantaneous libraries of Babel in our pockets at all times, and causes what the Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi described as “the slow cancellation of the future,” a feeling of time’s forward propulsion gradually decelerating until it barely moves at all. If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh. This is found in the ubiquity of reboots in our movie theaters, the diffuse archive-jumbling of our fashion trends, the collapse of unifying -isms in our contemporary art, the citational frenzy of our popular music, and, most nefariously, the conservative nostalgia that currently dominates Western politics.

And yet it is hard not to hear the claims of our missing originality as a kind of nostalgia in its own right, hearkening back to a semi-mythical past when artists were brave and fun, rent was cheap, and everything was new and meaningful. (Nostalgia for those material conditions, rather than a generalized haze of rebellion and inspiration, is well placed; as Fisher wrote, “If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages.”) On a rhetorical level, Marx’s sweeping judgment is very difficult to contest: either you dredge up a few artifacts of novelty that have gone ignored, which reads as a little pathetic (please, sir, what about hyperpop?), or you are forced to defend the material he has dismissed as worthless (Addison Rae, Paris Hilton, the Real Housewives; his harbingers of cultural apocalypse—my harbingers of a great night!), which reads as a naive defense of late-capitalist consumerism. It is true that we are a generation stuck in a loop: many tiny loops, looping at different speeds, looping into other loops, as if we were all wedged inside an undulating Ruth Asawa sculpture, but instead of wire it is made of time. Maybe we are living in a marshland. Many creatures do.

“What’s so bad about repetition?” the compulsion asks. But, no, really, what’s so bad about repetition? Or perhaps it would be better rephrased as: What’s so good about innovation?…

… It does not surprise me that millennials and zoomers might be wary, unconsciously or otherwise, of contributing anything “new” to a stretch of history that has voraciously eaten newness only to cough up suffering. What about the past fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years makes barreling toward the future seem like a good idea? The Doomsday Clock reads eighty-five seconds to midnight, and for many across the globe a more local apocalypse has already arrived. Some of the archive fever of the past twenty-five years might be a form of emotional anti-accelerationism, a generation desperately trying to produce a wind drag on the forward velocity powered by the deathly machinery of the twentieth century. To approach the world “anew,” we might need to embrace the word’s cyclonic strangeness, its inherent paradox, defined as “once again” (and again, and again, and again, and again, and again), “in a different way.”…

Read on: “Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?” (a perfect example of Betteridge’s Law :-) from @yalereview.bsky.social

* W. H. Auden

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As we rethink repetition, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that a man who used something old to make something new– and played a key role in transition from the blues to rock and roll– had his only #1 hit: Bo Diddley‘s eponymously-titled debut single reached the top of Billboard’s R&B chart.

Five months later– and five months before Elvis Presley’s first appearance– Bo Diddley, born Ellas Otha Bates, made his television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show… and introduced the mainstream American audience to the 4/4 wonder we would come to know as Rock and Roll.  He performed his signature tune, “Bo Diddley”– which prefigured such classics as Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and the Stangeloves’ “I Want Candy,” among countless others. In the kinescope of the show (below), the studio audience can be heard clapping heartily along.

Diddley later recalled that Ed Sullivan had expected him to perform only a cover version of “Tennessee” Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” and was furious with him for opening with “Bo Diddley”– so furious that Sullivan banned him from future appearances on his show.  But the damage was done:  as George Thorogood told Rolling Stone: “[Chuck Berry’s] ‘Maybellene’ is a country song sped up… ‘Johnny B. Goode’ is blues sped up.  But you listen to ‘Bo Diddley,’ and you say, ‘What in the Jesus is that?’”