The blank space normalized celebrity wealth as culture’s ultimate metric

Evidence

This bred a pervasive nihilism among creators, fans, and critics—one that insists there’s nothing wrong with the blank space as long as we are entertained and our cultural heroes earn a decent living. By that standard, the past twenty-five years have delivered: We’ve had plenty of excitement, and celebrities have been compensated like never before. Billions of people now make and share content every day, and many creators are literal billionaires. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 32

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the omnivore monoculture thesis: abundance plus compensation as a substitute for aesthetic value.

Related

• Sheer entertainment volume masks but does not satisfy cultural function (similarity 0.85)
• Only mainstream celebrity satisfies the human need for shared culture (similarity 0.83)
• Celebrity fame now functions as a loss leader for other products (similarity 0.79)
• Celebrity and commerce displaced creative invention as culture’s central values. (similarity 0.79)
• Attention-driven culture collapsed honor into infamy, rewarding sociopaths (similarity 0.78)