AJ Chronicles: There’s no Shortage of Art. We Ran Out of Ways to Find It.

Last week we collected 126 stories. Here’s what I learned

A growing chorus of critics is asking if we’ve hit a creative dead end in the 21st Century. A new book by W. David Marx, Blank Space, argues that the years from 2000 to 2025 will be remembered as a creative dark age, a time in which culture became a blank. He believes we’ve built a “pluralistic monoculture” that values commercial validation over novelty and virality over invention. Nothing transformative has been made, we endlessly recycle already well-worn themes, and creativity has dried up. Derivative movies, recycled music, retread “franchise” movies, tired visual tropes, and a numbing ocean of meaningless video. So what has happened to art?

Marx has plenty of company. The New York Times Magazine called this the least innovative century since the printing press. The Atlantic asked whether we’re living through the worst era of American pop culture. New York Magazine ran “The Stupid Issue” as it cataloged our current cultural obsessions. Each wonder if we’ve run out of gas.

This is by no means a new complaint. Every aging generation looks at what comes after it and wonders what happened to values and originality. It wasn’t too long ago that tech observers were floating the idea that our ability to innovate had bottomed out in the 90s.

In her review of Marx’s book in the Yale Review, Audrey Wollen set out to rebut the premise and points to hyperpop and a Los Angeles band called Purity playing covers of covers in backyards and gallery openings as an example of creative innovation. Which it certainly is. But it’s also not visible in traditional channels that used to be essential in order to be found and noticed.

What she’s describing, I think, is the major disconnect of contemporary culture: Findability has detached from the ability of traditional cultural narratives to agree on what’s important. Instead of art evolving in coherent strands that are traceable and linear — Baroque counterpoint (Bach) giving way to Classical clarity and balanced form (Haydn, Mozart). Beethoven stress-testing Classical form from the inside until it becomes Romanticism. Late Romanticism (Wagner, Mahler) stretching chromaticism so far that tonality dissolves — there are now multiple cultural universes, each with their own languages and conventions. Each has its own creative masters, famous within that universe. But from the outside, these adjacent universes are all but invisible and their languages opaque. Stumble into some of these and you will be blown away by the skill, dedication and creativity involved.

Production of culture has never been so prolific or inexpensive to make. You can record albums, make films, program games, publish books and build audiences in the millions from your bedroom. All bypassing traditional structures of culture. No gatekeepers. No production houses, no publishers, no capital investors, no critics. The gatekeepers are no longer an essential step on the way to getting to an audience, building a community, or establishing a viable aesthetic or even an art form. But they also don’t register in the traditional culture structures that determined value in the old order.

Meanwhile, those layers that used to stand between making culture and the rest of us — the publishers, studios, producers, critics, radio hosts, magazines, and editors with a point of view, have been weakened. The traditional culture apparatus still exists, though in diminished form. I described this crumbling system for classical music in an interview last week over at Bachtrack, arguing that the civic middleware that made music not just available but findable and meaningful has been collapsing. Because of that, outside of those who grew up with the traditional cultural apparatus and know how to work its levers, in the world of endless and now-viable cultural universes, the traditional culture system has become… largely invisible to new audiences. They simply never encounter it or see a reason to do so.

The media critic Matt Pearce recently described the collapse of our gatekeeper system as a transfer of the difficult cognitive work of sorting that critics and gatekeepers did. The hard work of critical judgement has been offloaded to the audience, an audience that is completely overwhelmed by the flood of culture and the work required to make judgments. So an exhausted audience reaches for shortcuts to make their cultural choices, which makes them vulnerable to algorithms that flatten those choices.

The Walrus last week ran a plea to bring back the gatekeepers — not the culture police of old, but the picky curators who sift through half-formed work and what’s ready for prime time. The New Yorker, pondering a prize-winning story that appears to have been written by a chatbot, traced our slide from poptimism — a measure of quality by how popular something is — to what the writer Katy Waldman coined as sloptimism: if a lot of something exists and people engage with it, how bad can it be?

When you can no longer assess worth outside the metric of mass audience consumption, and wide success now means mere familiarity, then anything new reads as noise. Or as nothing. Note here that by this scale, the intrinsic cultural worth, the essence of a piece of art itself, is not even relevant as a measure of success.

In this kind of universe, streamers scout BookTok for their next adaptations because an algorithm-minted bestseller is a pre-validated title with an audience. And platforms that promised to be new discovery engines have, as El País put it last week, decided your friends are a burden. The platforms just want you to see ads, between the AI-generated filler. No friends necessary. The new middleware optimizes for recognition, not discovery, and is heavily incentivized to show you versions of what you’ve already seen.

So it isn’t that our art has gotten less creative. Or that we no longer have attention spans that can’t tolerate complex art. The crisis isn’t a famine of creativity, it’s a failure of sorting, of navigation. Abundance without curation doesn’t feel like abundance, it feels like static, and static feels like work.

So the challenge isn’t so much to be more creative or to make culture matter again. It already is and already does. This may be the most creative era humanity has ever produced — everyone with a smartphone in their pocket is curating and making culture. The challenge is to build (or rebuild) a middleware that finds, sorts and creates meaning around art, and to decide, deliberately, whether the thing we build serves discovery or just feeds us more of what we already know. Blank space is only blank because connective tissues have atrophied. It is now the essential job of cultural institutions not just to make art and support artists but give them more and better ways to connect to the rest of us.

Also Worth Your Attention

The audience is quietly building its own middleware, one object at a time. Teenagers are walking into record stores. Australian record shops report the age of their average customer dropping from fifty to twenty-two. At the same time, a design movement the Guardian calls “anti-slop” is coalescing around conspicuously handmade, janky, and primitive things. This may be a reaction to AI. People are reaching for things whose provenance they can hold, because their digital feeds have become unreadable or generic. Is this a curation problem? When algorithms flatten out your digital diet, perhaps you curate with your hands. It doesn’t seem like a return to the past but a market forming around something that infinite content can’t supply, which is the handmade, the imperfect, the physical. The evidence is mounting.

Pennsylvania and the culture economy trap. Last year the state’s arts council renamed itself “Pennsylvania Creative Industries” and rewrote its rules so that organizations with budgets under $100,000 were no longer eligible. This excluded the smallest, most local, most experimental groups in the name of economic practicality. Last week the council reversed course. So, lessons? When you justify culture by economic value, you eventually optimize for economic value and prune away what doesn’t scale — which is to say, the small and unproven places where the “new” everyone claims to be missing actually germinates.

Related