What do author James Joyce and Kim Kardashian have in common?

David Marks' fateful scroll in 21st century pop culture. “Empty Space” is mostly a cringe catalogue.

The Kardashians continue to barge in, joined by Paris Hilton, Milo Yiannopoulos, MAGA hat-wearing trolls, modern-day Hitler enthusiast Kanye West and many more. The book's collection of Z-lists is so deep that even the most infamous Kevin Federline-level hacks cannot fit within its pages. According to Marx's calculations, we have lived for 25 years in conditions of mediocrity, with no end in sight. Couture is now fast fashion. Art is IP, AI, MCU and NFT. Patronage has turned into fraud.

“Where society once encouraged and provided for an abundance of cultural invention, there is now an empty space,” writes Marx. Yes, he looks askance at Taylor Swift, or at least her savvy, borderline cynical approach to fandom. After all, the book's title is a reference to one of her hits. This may seem like the grievance of a critic who misses the good old days. But Marx's critique is based less on pop culture preferences than on concerns about the ruthless ways in which capitalism and the Internet manipulate the way we consume, discuss and use art. Algorithms designed to ensure sameness and profit have effectively relegated provocation to the background. Revanchist conservatism, he believes, hastened to fill the vacuum.

Wasn't it so long ago that everything was fine with us? The Obama era may have been the high point of inclusivity on the surface, but the past decade has demonstrated just how thin that cultural veneer was. As Marks writes with brutal equanimity, “Trump won the election. Even Lena Dunham's rap video supporting Hillary as MC Pantsuit for Funny or Die couldn't convince America to elect its first female president.” MAGA, Marx argues, was not simply a product of Donald Trump's cult of personality; it was the culmination of years of ever-growing hot spots for macho preening such as Vice magazine (co-founded by Gavin McInnes, who later found the proud boys) and manosphere podcasters like Joe Rogan. Trump—regressive, offensive, reactionary—was not special, he was simply electable.

Marx's background is in fashion journalism, and “Blank Space” may seem a little over-the-top of that world, detailing the history of fashion lines such as Bathing monkey and luxury brands' discomfort with streetwear. But fashion articles are good exercise for emphasizing that cultural alignment across all disciplines is rooted in issues of class and money. A certain degree of exclusivity matters when it comes to culture, especially for high-end brands, and it starts with changes at street level. But now the street is built on ideas of instant fame: “selling out”, once a pejorative, has now become an ambition.

This shift, coupled with the algorithm's demands for attention, has made the culture drab and cowardly. Memes, #fypAnd Hawkgirl, luck Now we have a common currency. Artists from Beyoncé on down are being pulled “into one-size-fits-all business roles and forcing fans to spend their money not just on media but on a wide range of premium, mediocre products,” Marks writes. “In this new paradigm, the 'culture industry' could no longer sustain itself through culture alone. Personal fame was the leading loss in the sale of things.”

There's plenty of room to disagree with all of this: you and I could list any number of novels, feature films, and television shows that demonstrate the type of boundary-pushing that Marx said he was striving for. (It makes some sense that intellectual books and films wouldn't get their due in Blank Space, since it's a relatively niche endeavor, but its relative neglect of prestige television seems a curious omission.) Still, for every Children of Men there's a dozen Minions knockoffs, for every Pimp a Butterfly a tidal wave of brain rot. The “optimism” of the early 2000s, which condemned judges for demonstrating prudence, opened the door to a lack of “it’s okay” insight.

Whether this is what has set us on the slippery slope of Kanye West selling swastika T-shirts remains an open question. But there is no doubt that artists are struggling uphill like never before. “How did promoting timeless artistry at the expense of superficial commercial reality become an ‘elitist’ position?” Marks asks a question near the end, urging both creators and consumers to avoid the guilt associated with poptimism and act outside the algorithm.

What will it look like? Perhaps this will help set the time machine back a century. IN “Danger to the minds of young girls.” critic Adam Morgan examines the case of Margaret K. Anderson, who founded the literary magazine Little Review in 1914. Although its circulation was as small as its title suggests, it had an enormous influence on modernist writing. Hiring the ardent poet Ezra Pound as her European talent scout, Anderson began publishing the works of T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and others, most famously in the serialization of James Joyce's Ulysses, a decision that made her a target of censors and conservatives.

“Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret K. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Struggle for Literary Modernization” by Adam Morgan

(Published by Atria/One Signal)

The woman at the center of what Morgan calls “America's first modern culture war” was ill-suited to her times. Stubborn, strange, and uninterested in Victorian piety, she fled her stifling family in Indianapolis and headed to Chicago, where she hustled to work as a bookseller and reviewer. But her endorsement of then-risqué fare such as Theodore Dreiser's “Sister Carrie” drew ridicule from editors. “They wanted moral judgments from me, not literary ones,” she said.

She struck out on her own, launching Little Review with her lover Jane Heap. Anderson was fascinated by outsiders—not just avant-garde writers but also radicals like Emma Goldman. She responded to the haters in the letters section. When money became tight, she moved into a tent north of Chicago to keep the magazine afloat. And when moral outrage seized upon passages from Ulysses—to quote Comstock's Law a ban on sending “obscene” material through the U.S. mail, she countered. Copies of the magazine were confiscated and burned, and her lawyer's argument that Joyce's language was too complex to serve as pornography fell on deaf ears.

Even that lawyer, John Quinn, knew that these efforts were likely to be futile: “You are damned fools trying to get away with publishing Ulysses in this Puritan country,” he wrote to Anderson and Heap. (The two were ordered to pay a fine of $50 each, which would be about $900 today.) With today's sepia filter, it's easy to romanticize this story of a lesbian arts champion who makes the world safe for modernism. But one valuable thing Morgan's story does is take away the shine of Anderson's achievements. Anderson had to play the long game with no guarantee of success. From month to month she constantly asked patrons for support. She had to hide her sexuality, make frustrating compromises in what she published, and absorb attacks and ridicule from the masses who treated her as a curiosity.

It was not a wasted effort, however: her defense of Ulysses paved the way for its eventual publication in the United States, and the controversy helped its cause. (James Joyce, like Kim Kardashian, understood that a sex scandal could be good for business.) In recent years, she lived largely as she pleased, collecting lovers and becoming a follower of eccentrics. mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. Anderson didn't have an algorithm to fight, but she did have a harsh moral climate to navigate, and her story is an object lesson in the one virtue that the algorithm has no tolerance for: patience. If we want our world to have more works like Ulysses (and a lot less cringe-worthy ones), the financial and critical path is no easier now than it was then. But this will require the stubbornness of creators and the dedication of consumers that the current moment is designed to deprive us of.

Afitakis is a Phoenix-based writer and author of The New Midwest.