A pop-culture skeptic on the 21st-century works that really matter

In his new book, “Blank Space” — one of Book World’s 50 notable nonfiction books of 2025 — the critic and historian W. David Marx argues that the last quarter-century has been marked by the dramatic decline of creative innovation. His point isn’t that contemporary culture is barren, just that we increasingly value existing commercial success over artistic novelty. That means we aren’t as good as we once were at recognizing and celebrating the people creating strange and wonderful things at the margins.

“Blank Space” is a polemic of sorts, one that investigates the recent past to call for a more varied and transformative future. But Marx isn’t a cynic. “There’s no crisis of creativity, in that there are more people around the world creating culture than ever before,” he told The Washington Post when we called him to chat about his book. And he’s hardly against popularity, as his guiding lights include Beyoncé. He discussed with us a number of recent works — songs and television shows, especially — that might help shake us out of the malaise he identifies.

Marx’s explanations have been edited for length and clarity.

“Formation” by Beyoncé

This song is a great example of a hit artist using their platform to be quite musically adventurous. It takes elements of trap, but in ways that are unique, and adds innovative production and other elements on top. Its lyrics represent some sort of political critique or political movement, without being so narrow as to say, “I’m commenting on this one issue”: They’re just broadly useful to people in political movements.

It was used quite centrally in the Women’s March of 2017, but the lyrics themselves are not referring to the march. It’s a perfect case of somebody using their stardom to innovate and create work that defines the time. So to me, that’s almost a perfect piece of pop culture from the era.

To my mind, fixing culture requires influential artists taking seriously that cultural change and innovation are social goods.

“Brat” by Charli XCX

One of the biggest problems of the 21st century has been what I would call the big blur: There’s so much change that, if you look at it through a macro lens, you can’t really start seeing like, “Oh, everything was like this in the 2000s, and then everything was like this in the 2010s.” There are big changes, but they’re just not as obvious as they used to be.

So when you had a work of art define an era that lets you say, “I remember specifically what era this work of art was representing,” I think that is also effective. “Brat,” the Charli XCX album, was incredibly successful in that specific way. She said, “It’s Brat Summer,” and it became so. That required the aesthetic that went with it, that green album cover, being almost obnoxious in terms of the color’s shade and the amateurishness of the typography. That, mixed with the emotional vulnerability of the lyrics and the cutting-edge hyper-pop club production, helped make it quite distinct from the rest of the monoculture.

“Twin Peaks: The Return” by David Lynch

If you list the best films of the 21st century, many were created by auteurs whose careers began in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. I think there’s an advantage that older, more seasoned filmmakers still have.

“Twin Peaks: The Return” was certainly one of the most difficult and challenging pieces of television ever made. It is structurally very strange, but also it’s almost 18 hours long. The pacing is so slow, and there’s a refusal to give the audience the thing that they want. The fan service was all held toward the last hour of it.

Of course, David Lynch is singular. But he showed everybody that creative invention is not an age thing, it’s a mindset, which allowed him to make the most amazing piece of television so far in the 21st century.

“Girls” by Lena Dunham

I think Lena Dunham is an incredible director and a great comedian, which is why “Girls” still stands up. She was given the ability to make a show about her generation, and it’s now something that will always mark that period in time. You can say it’s a privileged or narrow view of that generation, but it will forever remain as a well-made artifact of the era.

Many of the things we love from the 20th century are documents of youth culture, whether it’s countercultural movies from the ’60s like “Easy Rider,” or from the ’90s like “Trainspotting,” or footage of early punk shows from London — we just crave something that captures what people were doing at a certain time. And I think “Girls” will always matter because it was the first major work about millennials created by a millennial.

“The Rehearsal” by Nathan Fielder

“The Rehearsal” is an incredible piece of television as well as an incredible piece of pop culture, largely because of how it deeply tinkers with the reality format. So much of reality TV, starting with “Survivor,” is not about cinema verite-style documentaries. It’s all manipulated, building drama out of nonfiction footage. “Survivor” would take dialogue from one scene and put it in another, they would do reenactments to get better shots. (Props to Emily Nussbaum’s “Cue the Sun,” a smart history of reality TV that everyone should read.)

The reality format itself, I would say, has struggled to be truly inventive. But I think “The Rehearsal” takes the broad concept of a reality show and twists it, and you never know what you’re going to get with a single episode. The fact that you can still invent new forms of comedy and, especially in the second season, have it all wrap up in a big magic trick is quite incredible. It shows the promise of taking a cookie-cutter template for TV and doing something else with it. Great artists can take what is expected of them and execute radical invention inside of it.