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.
