Twenty-first century culture is abundant in volume but lacks its own symbolic innovations

Evidence

Were you not entertained? Nearly every day of the twenty-first century provided new distractions: viral memes, outrageous statements, celebrity meltdowns, life hacks and horoscopes, leaked album tracks, extremely talented animals. Culture has never contained more stuff—an endless reel of words, ideas, games, songs, and videos. There were more gradations of celebrity than ever, with influencers shilling an ever-expanding cornucopia of private-label goods. And thanks to poptimism and entrepreneurial heroism, the culture industry’s most successful figures got paid very well for their contributions. Consumers elected a new aristocracy of billionaires and mere multimillionaires: Taylor Swift, Jimmy Iovine, George Clooney, Ryan Reynolds, King Jay-Z, and Queen Bey. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 841

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of stating Marx’s thesis and building the counter-case on omnivore monoculture. — connects to: The twenty-first century has failed to produce a culture of its own — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2285