You're not the only one who's bored You're not the only one who's bored - Harvard Gazette

"That's according to W. David Marx '01, author of the new book "Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century." "Culture has been central to the narrative of the last 25 years - but merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics," Marx writes. "We can feel what's missing - there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be. For all the energy invested in culture today, little has emerged that feels new at a symbolic level.""

"The term monoculture describes what it feels like when culture is really controlled by a small group of people, so the format is more or less conventional, and you can't really bend from it. And the omnivorous part started in the '80s and '90s among sophisticated, cosmopolitan consumers, where you're no longer only consuming high art, but it becomes a higher-status thing to consume all art - highbrow, middle brow, lowbrow, global, local."

Pop culture of the 21st century is dominated by reboots, mashups, and flash trends, producing little in the way of truly innovative art. Culture operates largely as entertainment, commerce, and politics, leaving a conspicuous blank space where symbolic creativity once thrived. Mainstream consumption became omnivorous in the 1980s and 1990s, with audiences embracing highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, global, and local forms alike. That omnivorous monoculture results in everyone consuming everything while very few creators achieve lasting dominance. Prolonged prominence by figures like Taylor Swift and genre mashups such as Lil Nas X illustrate cross-genre mixing has become unsurprising rather than groundbreaking.

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