do you have a gift link?
it’s not backed up on archive.ph
I came across this review while trying to track it down. I don’t agree with their criticism at all, though I haven’t read the book yet.
But gone are the days when there was one shared set of references every artist must respond to or debate, because now, the art world is finally diverse enough to sustain multiple lineages at once. This is frustrating for the narrator who wants to master them all simultaneously but can’t—and worse, doesn’t realize he can’t.
If history is any indicator, the men still insisting culture is dead will go down the way critics of Impressionism and Cubism did: as conservative curmudgeons very much on the wrong side of history. You would think writers so obsessed with the past would have learned as much.
they’re intentionally missing the point here by framing his complaint as being about diversity rather than stagnation. I don’t think fragmentation away from a single positivist narrative is the main issue so much as a lack of creativity anywhere and being stuck in the past. The problem is closer to what Mark Fisher described as the slow cancellation of the future.
if the promised long tail exists and people like Marx are just missing it because of their biases, they aren’t providing any evidence for it here. It’s also telling that they never directly discuss the effect of technology and algorithms in particular on any of this despite acknowledging that it is an important part of Marx’s thesis. They don’t address material factors like media consolidation either.
sorry for the tangent, I’m definitely going to check out the book though. I read Klosterman’s The Nineties recently, and Blank Space seems like a good way to pick up where it left off.