The era’s signature is abundance of culture with blankness at the symbolic level

Evidence

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. For all the energy invested in culture today, little has emerged that feels new at a symbolic level. Certainly, nothing radical enough to fully outmode the past. Audrey Hepburn, Miles Davis, and Joan Didion remain iconic because no one has emerged who can compete with their cool. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 843

Categorization

• XREF: This is the precise thesis statement the reader must be able to state and rebut. Note the ‘blank’ in the book title — the failure of new iconicity (Hepburn, Davis, Didion unreplaced) is his evidence.
• DEFINE: Defines what ‘blank space’ means concretely: art reduced to entertainment, commerce, politics. Core to chapter’s argument.
• SEED: Counter-case angle: are Hepburn/Davis/Didion actually ‘cool’ in the old sense, and is icon-failure an artifact of fragmented attention rather than genuine blankness?