If you want to know about contemporary popular art (television, music, movies, perhaps a few books), you’ve got to know the names. I don’t mean the names of artists, writers, musicians, actors, or directors. I don’t mean the names of the big studios, publishers, and record companies either. I mean names behind the names: the names of equity, the money faucets, the money pools, the money men. It’s bleak fun to list them; money has so many names now.
You might be familiar with a few of these: take Bain Capital, which gave us Mitt Romney in 2012 and the takeover of Warner Music in 2004. Or there’s the Carlyle Group, a nest for figures like George H. W. Bush. And you know BlackRock’s in the house. But there are many others, and often they have appellations from a Pynchon novel: Pershing Square, Archegos Capital Management, State Street, Vanguard, KKR, Colony Capital, Apollo Global Management, Silver Lake, AlpInvest, Saban Capital Group, Providence Equity Partners, Pluribus Capital, Red Zone Capital Management, RatPac-Dune Entertainment (that’s Steven Mnuchin, the Trump 1.0 cabinet secretary), the ominously named “Disney Accelerator.” This profusion might make it sound like the media and culture industries are heterogeneous, varied, and diverse, pumping out more innovative content every day—who can ever keep up with new shows?—but they aren’t.
Instead, there’s a lot of capital collecting in a very few hands. That’s because the past several decades have seen rampant consolidation via mergers and acquisitions across creative fields, all of it backed by rivers of Wall Street equity. In visual media, for example, there are just five major players (Comcast, Disney, Sony, Paramount, and Warner Bros). The music industry, meanwhile, has the big three labels (Universal, Sony, Warner). Silicon Valley, of course, is up to its neck in media production and distribution via platforms like Hulu and Netflix, and has just five prime stakeholders (Meta, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft).
The story of contemporary popular art, then, is centralization. That is, it’s the same pattern we have seen everywhere during what Robert Brenner calls “the long downturn”: the ongoing post-1973 period of declining industrial productivity, mushrooming debt, and—most important for our story—rising financialization of the economy, the turn toward the trading floors of London and Manhattan, with all the cultural inequality and decay this entails.
The same class of people stripping journalism and higher education for parts, then, are also fully in control of the apparatus used to produce narrative and visual art. And, as Andrew deWaard, an assistant professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, shows in his shocking new study Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, this same class of people are constructing “a more poisonous, extractive media system,” where “production cultures are increasingly constrained by extraction cultures.”
The first half of Derivative Media historicizes and theorizes the rise of high-finance art, then the latter chapters turn to specific media properties. One of the most exciting elements of the book is how deWaard swings between a granular critique of texts and “distant,” quantitative, macro-scale research into vast corpuses of textual information collected in databases like Genius (for song lyrics) and IMDb (film and television). Using cataloging software, he examines vast swathes of lyric composition and intertextual reference for patterns in artistic production, in everything from Jay-Z tracks to 30 Rock episodes, “on a scale that would not be possible without computation” or “the database form” or rigorous “data visualization.” If you want charts of industry mergers, market trends, and the rate at which various types of cars get name-checked by rappers, deWaard has you covered, as he plots the connections between what a Marxist might call the economic base and the cultural superstructure. If you’d like to know how individual linguistic and aesthetic signifiers (Mercedes, Patrón, Star Wars, Apple, GE, McDonald’s) get deployed in specific texts, deWaard does criticism on that scale too. This is a scholar who personally catalogued all the references in 30 Rock, perhaps the most referential show ever made, then visualized his findings in dense, colorful graphics, all while listening to a lot of Billboard rap. DeWaard’s work provoked a lot of uneasy encounters between art I like and the realities of culture capitalism. Your favorite work might be stained with blood. It probably smells like cash.
The result? On this and much else, deWaard is direct: “Power has been concentrated within financial institutions and is expressed using financial instruments and financial engineering strategies,” and “it is obscured behind byzantine shell corporations, complex mathematics, and an army of mostly men in expensive suits. It’s a convoluted story, but it can be told simply: the money pools in one location.” DeWaard doesn’t put it quite this way, but I would: What emerges from his book is a host of (yet more) reasons everyone should be a Marxist.
Thus, Derivative Media is not about a lost golden age in Hollywood or music or whatever. DeWaard is clear about this: Under capitalism, these have always been for-profit ventures with industrial conditions. And whether you’re talking Nina Simone or The Matrix or all those Renaissance paintings the Medici family had done, art and commerce have always existed in what we might charitably call an uneasy tension.
Indeed, for theorist Max Haiven, money and art form one of modernity’s core dialectics. They are not “mutually opposed mythical forces” but “mutually encrypting structures”: “Art,” Haiven claims in Art After Money, Money After Art, “cannot be corrupted by capitalism because it has always already been derivative of capitalism.” Yet even he concedes that “art is never completely or fully incorporated: what allows it to generate its saleable contemporaneity is precisely the small latitude of incomplete freedom, obstreperousness, antagonism, and radicality it is afforded.”
The key word here being “saleable”—even radical work can be ingested by capital and used to comfort or enrich “people who,” deWaard observes, “treat culture as just another input in their cash-flow-extraction strategies.” And, as he tells it, capital has figured out new ways to penetrate artistic production and to metastasize through the circuits of distribution and consumption of artworks: fracturing once-coherent human systems in order to wring out new profits.
Everyone’s brain gets melted. Critique dies. Numbed consumption wins. We pay good money for this.
The culture industries have been thoroughly colonized by complex financial players (mainly hedge funds and private-equity groups) and their warped logics of sociality. Wall Street has the copyrights, the masters, the deeds. What might seem like a firehose of new art—fresh indie artists appear on Spotify all the time, A24 distributes a lot of movies, the New York Times still has book lists—is, in reality, “a Russian nesting doll of conglomeration and investment.”
It gets worse. Beyond the sectoral infestation of artistic fields by capital, the takeover of film production and song catalogs and radio stations, Wall Street has found ways to financialize art at the constitutive level of the text itself. It’s not just the industries that are financialized; works qua works are themselves securitized investment vehicles, too. In a song or show, for example, every nod to alcohol or cars can lead to further monetization opportunities. Any memorable words, ironic references, witty allusions, striking images, and catchy songs can all be broken up, “securitized,” and redistributed, across platforms owned by a few people.
Indeed, for the masters of the universe, there is no art, only content, only intellectual property. DeWaard argues that “financialized texts become sites of capital formation” alone, and that “culture has a subservient role in the financial system, which sees it as merely another numerical value to trade. The stock exchange,” he continues, “has been embedded within the media text.” The result? Mostly “flooding the zone with shit,” with “lots of content, but little creativity or criticism.” Thus, both the culture industries and the artworks they disgorge are “derivative,” in the double sense. On the one hand, they are literally financialized; on the other, they are increasingly boring, toothless, and antiradical.
There is no such thing as a “naturally occurring media economy,” deWaard contends. “There is only political economy, a system of social relations constituted through law and institutional behaviors, one that is currently arranged hierarchically and could just as easily be arranged differently. The one we have is driven by power, not exchange of goods and services.” In other words, to understand art, you must talk power, which means talking money.
It is tempting to narrate this as just another branch in the gruesome story of neoliberalism, the post-’70s marketization and privatization of the world. And to be fair, deregulatory monsters like Reagan and Clinton are part of this story. But by drawing on a tradition of Marxist historical scholarship, deWaard asks us to think more widely of capitalism’s “longue durée” over the past 600 years, where, if we look right, we see the cyclical reemergence of finance capital. Again and again, capitalist systems mature, wither, and morph into new structures and nodes of power. It happened to Renaissance Italy, to the Dutch trading empire (think of those Old Masters), to imperial Britain, and now to the United States, with its loosening grip on hegemony.
DeWaard concurs with historian Samuel Chambers, quoting the latter’s contention that “there is no such thing as ‘the economy’” in the sense of a naturally occurring free market, only “an overlapping, uneven, discontinuous, and non-bounded domain” that is simultaneously political, financial, social, and cultural.1 This extends to the media economy, which deWaard argues is not a balanced system of supply and demand where artists satisfy the existential needs of consumer-customers who “decide what is popular.” Thanks to deregulation of the finance industry in the 1980s and ’90s, hedge funds and private-equity groups and investment banks were suddenly off the leash and eager to direct “the economy” to where they could accumulate the most.2 Finance, deWaard says, is a machine controlled by the powerful; it changes and directs economic trends and “is not a picture or representation of some external phenomenon we call the marketplace; rather, finance has become the powerful engine that drives the marketplace in certain directions. The destination is power, wealth, and inequality.”
Thus, rather than a seemingly organic creation and exchange of goods, what we see everywhere is simply the flexing of elite power: when corporations offer shareholder dividends and stock buybacks; when CEO compensation balloons; when mergers permit “cartel-like behavior” by too-big-to-fail conglomerates; when musicians get paid pennies for streams, while consumers are trapped within a “rentier logic” that privileges access over ownership; when even our best art house films are funded by capricious billionaires; when hedge funds proliferate (11,000 operating today) with “no incentive to produce value, only extract it,” capturing Rolling Stone and Artforum along the way; when private-equity vultures leverage debt to buy companies and then strip the copper from their walls, leaving “bankruptcies, layoffs, and unpaid bills.” All of these instances of elite power deWaard labels “vehicles for upward redistribution,” and he goes on to quote Henry Hill’s Mafia credo from Goodfellas (1990): “Fuck you, pay me.”
Artists, musicians, actors, writers, and other media creatives, along with their audiences, get fucked. Financiers get paid.
Wall Street is versed in literary theory, even if this “cultural cartel enacting mass theft of creativity” doesn’t know it, or care.
To begin: Financialization entails abstracting away from the attributes of an existing thing: as deWaard has it, “derivatives are an instrument to hedge or speculate on risk, basically a wager on the fluctuation of the cost of money, currencies, assets, or the relationships among them … Their value is derived from the performance of an underlying entity” (original italics) that is not itself traded. Further, this “logic of fluid conversion,” whereby every coherent asset can be abstracted and “unbundled” into fungible instruments, is “a natural fit for transnational media conglomerates with holdings in film, television, music, the popular press, video games, online media, theme parks, and other cultural properties.” Artworks are not cohesive objects but rather collections of glittering fragments that can be packaged, traded, resold.
In 1980, around the same time the US economy was getting financialized, the literary critic Julia Kristeva theorized “intertextuality,” the concept that no artistic text is legible as a singular bounded item, but is rather always “a mosaic of quotations” from other texts, contexts, and viewers/readers. In deWaard’s telling there is now “a concrete bankability to the once-radical concept.” When art becomes IP, each privately owned and “radically open text offers vast intertextual and intermedial opportunities for potential profit,” and his subsequent description of Kristeva’s nightmare is worth quoting at length:
Derivative media operationalizes intertextuality. On one end of the spectrum, figurative devices such as allusion, parody, satire, and homage create constellations of textual reference and influence; on the other, commercial devices such as product placement, brand integration, branded entertainment, and native advertising deliver consumer influence. The latter typically involves a direct transfer of money, while the former often enacts an indirect exchange of cultural capital. The key to this exchange is the interplay between these two forms of “derivation,” the textual and the financial.
In this “interconnected referential economy” every text has been “internally financialized,” and there is no outside we can escape to: “From the content of the securitized cultural text, to the fragmented audience that engages with it, to the precarious labor that produces it, to the overpaid management that organizes it, to the networks that circulate it, to the indebted corporations that catalog it, to the systems of accumulation that facilitate it—financial capital now fuels the pop-music hit machine and the Hollywood dream factory.” Therefore, in this new gilded age, the same apparatus flooding the market with AI slop and Marvel sequels and Frasier reboots is simultaneously impoverishing artists.
Jay-Z put it memorably: “I’m not a businessman, / I’m a business, man.” Much as Jay-Z prides himself on artistry, all that lyrical firepower on display in albums like Reasonable Doubt (1996) and The Blueprint (2001) was for money, not laurels.
“Hip-hop,” argues the critic Greg Tate, “is the perverse logic of capitalism pursued by an artform.” DeWaard concurs, and Derivative Media maps out a “lyrical marketplace” that “merges the formal and the financial,” because hip-hop was born in the 1970s, just like this round of financialization. As such, “its form, style, and structure have come to explicitly exhibit properties of its economic context … hip hop is not just subject to business processes, it is itself consciously a business process.”
MCs are “musician-speculators” whose every flow and word are embedded in a system where “lyrics are rendered fungible assets and securitized into a speculative instrument.” Many rappers like to boast about expensive vehicles and top-shelf booze, and deWaard uses computational analysis of Genuis’s lyric archive to plot patterns.
For example, Cristal fell off after the 1990s, while Patrón had a big moment in the recession aughts; Mercedes, meanwhile, has been a constant since the Clinton era. DeWaard notes economic connections like Courvoisier sales growing after Busta Rhymes’s 2002 single “Pass the Courvoisier Part II.” But he really zeroes in on Jay-Z’s relationship to Armand de Brignac champagne, which the mogul rechristened “Ace of Spades” in the late 2000s, shortly after investing in and just before becoming a majority owner of the brand. Seemingly organic references (“I used to drink Cristal, the muh’fucker’s racist / So I switched gold bottles on to that Spade shit”) are actually market moves.
In derivative modernity every text is a package of assets. The poet as petit-bourgeois business owner or, if she dreams big, a mogul.
But you can pack even more intertextuality into an episode of TV, and deWaard turns to 30 Rock: the pinnacle of the self-aware, allusive style of postmodern comedy that you also see in The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy. In what deWaard calls “securitized sitcoms”—where every joke about a real or fake brand is a chance to monetize and extend value—“the full extent of the fiscal exchange is concealed, but with added formal mechanisms such as parody, satire, and irony used as camouflage.” On financialized TV, “referential jokes as a form are rendered a potential asset class”: far less crude than midcentury product placement, far slyer and more sophisticated, congratulating the viewer on getting the joke, which is itself “a comedic shroud for the constant onslaught of brands and corporate texts.”
This is particularly true of Tina Fey’s creation, the in-house jester of NBCUniversal, which besides being brilliantly funny is an extended rumination on corporatized media. DeWaard calls it “industrial self-theorizing both ironic and lucrative.” In other words, the rapid-fire, poly-referential writing on 30 Rock is tongue-in-cheek humor that also pays well, that both “satisfies and subverts a corporate mandate” while congratulating the viewer’s intelligence. Make a satirical reference to Bed Bath & Beyond or Star Wars or Siri? That’s still intertextual placement, woven into the cultural object at the level of plot. Mock NBC, the company that employs everyone on 30 Rock? No problem. It all pays dividends for NBCUniversal’s parent company, Comcast.
Even the sharpest jokes on the show are ultimately situated within, not against, the status quo. Like The Simpsons, The Office, or Peep Show, 30 Rock is fundamentally conservative, in the sense of suggesting very little that would threaten the accumulation of capital or the current hierarchies of American society. Liz Lemon is awful, but she’s relatable, and nothing in the dense texture of incredibly good jokes on the show threatens anyone’s ability to make money in the real world. When she finds the perfect pair of jeans at a hip Brooklyn spot that regrettably turns out to be owned by a Halliburton slave-labor scheme, the joke lands. We get it: Halliburton, which helped loot and destroy Iraq in the 2000s (this episode aired in 2010), is evil. But nothing further. Congratulations. We are doing the standard bourgeois move of bearing witness to something terrible without a hint of how to change the conditions that produce it, only through the prism of genius joke writing.
It becomes a little sickening after a while, because “the winking is constant and the nudging becomes a sharp elbow.” No show told jokes faster or packed more references into its diegetic universe, and after a certain point it’s like being with a very witty person, which is to say exhausting. Indeed, the show’s universe is so parodic, so reflexive, so referential with respect to the detritus of the capitalism, that narrative-aesthetic interpretation isn’t sufficient—again, we must think like Wall Street. “Textual analysis typically involves asking questions about a text’s form, composition, and style,” deWaard points out. But “increasingly, that means asking: Was this formal component for sale? Might it be for sale in the future? What are the market relations and pricing mechanisms among these components”? There is no mise-en-scène, only what he calls “mise-en-synergy” (synergy being a favorite term of cynical managers like Liz’s boss, Jack): “the multi-platform relationship between audiovisual style, meaning, and economics.”
Don’t worry if you feel queasy—you still get the joke, like the other discerning consumers.
So if even a celebrated satire is domesticated and toothless—just a high-grade marketing ploy with jokes—where can one turn for radical art? You might think highbrow cinema would be the place to go, the stuff that isn’t Marvel Extended Universe sludge: the work of the Martin Scorseses and Greta Gerwigs and Bong Joon-hos and Alfonso Cuaróns of the world. Yet finance rules here, too.
The overwhelming majority of art house production and distribution companies are what deWaard calls “billionaire boutiques” funded by the largesse of a “plutocratic patron,” often the child of someone who made their money screwing over others. There’s Big Beach (Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go, Our Idiot Brother, The Farewell, and others), founded with a fortune Marc Turtletaub’s father, Alan, made giving out subprime mortgages prior to 2008. There’s Oracle magnate Larry Ellison’s child Megan, who runs Annapurna Pictures (Zero Dark Thirty, Phantom Thread, Her, If Beale Street Could Talk). And A24, distributing glossy, sensitive films (Ex Machina, Lady Bird, Hereditary, Uncut Gems, The Lobster)? Unfortunately, the company is a direct outgrowth of the Guggenheim mining fortune, built in the pits and quarries of the global South, and it is now run through the asset-management firm Guggenheim Partners, where A24’s cofounder Daniel Katz was once the head of film finance.
Most of the time, art house film is just reputation laundering or “corrupt philanthropy” or both. For the ownership class, nothing is fundamentally about art.
Good luck getting radical art past these gatekeepers. Challenges to the artistic, cultural, or political status quo are defanged in financialized Hollywood, since that status quo benefits Hollywood’s own elite. Even at the boutique houses, “social justice ideals are compromised, neutralized, and suppressed within the framework of plutocratic patronage,” and even the edgier films offer only “low-level, technocratic fixes” or appeals to individual nobility. Your film had better not suggest systemic change or critique capitalism.
Thus we get beautiful, mournful, liberal (at best) art—“a sort of calculating complicity”—and “the overall picture is one of mountains of wealth casting a shadow on arthouse theaters playing esoteric indie films.” And if one of those little movies does well financially, maybe you have just found your next Marvel director: Indies serve as “the research and development wing of Hollywood, as many of these directors are subsumed into blockbuster film and television.” Art continues to get made—that’s what human beings do—but capital devours it.
For me, the grimmest part of Derivative Media is the fact that deWaard isn’t just writing about trash. It would be one thing to take aim at reality TV, which everyone knows sucks; but 30 Rock is one of the best sitcoms ever made. There’s plenty of chart garbage in modern music; but at his peak Jay-Z was one of the greatest MCs who ever lived. A24 distributes a lot of incredible films that are the opposite of superhero schlock; it’s just all backed by the toil of workers in the global South.
The point of a blockbuster film isn’t cinema per se, profitable as these movies are. It’s to branch into other monetizable media, especially video-game voids that “attempt to build unique universes in which a broad range of [a company’s] intellectual property is not just exploited strategically, but offered in a more immersive manner.” I certainly experienced a dark night of the soul reading the list of Disney game properties: You’ve got Kingdom Hearts, the epochal multi-character hit spread over 13 editions, but also Disney Infinity, Disney Princess, Disney Magical World, Disney Dreamlight Valley, Disney Friends, Disney Ultimate, Disney Art Academy, Disney Learning, Epic Mickey, Disney Sing It, Dance Dance Revolution Disney Mix, Disney Twisted-Wonderland, Disney Magic Kingdoms, Disney Emoji Blitz, Disney Heroes: Battle Mode, Disney Fantasy Online, and the Disney Mirrorverse. It’s all right there on the internet; your students and children are probably playing these, each gaming universe a money and data hole, seductive as any drug from science fiction.
In Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Marxist critic Anna Kornbluh identifies “a master category for making sense of twenty-first-century cultural production” that is narrative or quasi-narrative, everything from fiction to theory to film to television: She calls it “immediacy.” Under a planetary regime premised on speed, instantaneity, urgent circulation, and fluid logistics (a “petrodepression hellscape”), art comes to resemble the economy: intense, immersive, fast, liquid, a “pulsing effulgence [that] purveys itself as spontaneous and free, pure vibe.” Art has a harder time with representation, intersubjectivity, duration, and critical thought (and audiences come to desire less of these). Kornbluh writes, “Fluid, smooth, fast circulation, whether of oil or information, fuels contemporary capitalism’s extremization of its eternal systemic pretext: things are produced for the purpose of being exchanged; money supersedes its role as mediator of exchange to become its end point.” And like deWaard, Kornbluh emphasizes the decay of narrative art forms, their general turn toward a slop of sequels, prequels, reboots, franchises. “What matters in [such] a universe is its endless replication,” she argues, “the distention without innovation of new ideas, new characters, new universes. And by ‘matters,’ one means ‘sells’: the twenty highest-grossing Hollywood films since 2010 were all sequels, eighteen of them issued by Disney” (original italics).
And this makes sense, for though deWaard targets good art, he certainly doesn’t ignore trash altogether. After all, the ultimate finance pipe dream is what he calls the “brandscape blockbuster,” the IP or “metaverse” movie, “derivative media at the scale of the world.” All this starts in the late Reagan era with a text I love, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a film that, thanks to Steven Spielberg’s many phone calls, blends 70 references from works belonging to multiple companies, including Disney, Turner, Universal, and Warner Bros. Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny even appear together for the only time in big-screen history. Imagine the possibilities!
In fact, plenty of people did. Sharks noticed that Roger Rabbit made over $350,000,000 at the box office. Subsequent, fully articulated IP franchises—which bleed from screen to screen, platform to platform, device to device—are the ultimate in the capitalist enclosure of media, which duplicates the real-world destruction of “anything resembling public or communal space that isn’t monetizable.” “With strategic licensing agreements and merchandising deals,” deWaard writes, “these brandscape blockbusters seek to develop a fantasyland made in the image of the financialized marketplace, reflecting our dystopian reality back to us as a playful fantasy.” Texts like Wreck-It Ralph, Avengers, and The LEGO Movie appeal to kids, of course, but there’s also “a drip feed of dopamine for older viewers playing spot-the-reference.”
It’s democratic: Everyone’s brain gets melted. Critique dies. Numbed consumption wins. We pay good money for this.
Reading Derivative Media’s account of the popular-art industries, now subject to finance instead of Fordism, I kept thinking about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which had its centenary three years ago. Part of this pertains to Eliot’s subject matter: Published in 1922 amid endless wars and just after a brutal pandemic, his modernist assemblage of allusions and texts imagines the West as a hellish necropolis, where civilization lies in fragments: “Unreal city, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.”
No need to get into Eliot’s royalist / Anglo-Catholic politics or to unpack all the allusions in just this selection (Baudelaire and Dante, basically), let alone the whole 434-line poem. What matters, here, is that his vision of the world resonates a century later, as we look down the barrel of hot-planet fascism, while flowing crowds stare at their phones.
Content aside, the form of “The Waste Land” matters too. For Eliot and other modernists, narrative as well as visual and lyric form could be fractured, rearranged, requoted, rendered multilateral and nonchronological. A million monographs have been written about this, and people go on arguing about whether it even makes sense to separate ironic modernist intertextuality from ironic postmodern collage. Eliot and David Foster Wallace both used endnotes. Anyway, Webster’s defines modernism as. …
There’s a rotten irony here, though: The reference farmers at Roc-A-Fella Records and 30 Rockefeller Plaza and “song management” firms like Hipgnosis are extractive parodists of Eliot (who also had a day job as a banker). For his part, though, the poet hoped to save something meaningful from the wreckage of war and illness: to shore some fragments against his ruin. Today, it’s about capital now, real money: the stuff that you can spend or hoard or both.
Eliot saw shards and pulled some together, because he felt spiritually compelled to. Financiers see fragments and yearn to mix them into new markets, pricing them ever more dearly.
Thus, we live inside Kristeva’s and Eliot’s black mirror, this extractive network of knowing allusions and winking irony, culture articulated not by melancholy artists but Wall Street ghouls. The landscape of social experience remains as atomized and alienating in 2025 as it was in 1922, with some new aesthetics and technologies, but with the same monster at its back (imperial capitalism).
If anything, the post-1970s reemergence of high finance puts Eliot’s grim view of the West—we’d now say the global North—on steroids. Now, the broken landscape is securitized; all the pieces have tradeable value, at least for a few people. We endure the same existential problems, plus the specter of biospheric collapse, plus capital colonizing more of interior and expressive life. In Civilization and Capitalism, Fernand Braudel calls the financialized stage of capitalism “a sign of autumn.” Maybe Eliot just got the date early. Then again, seven years after he published “The Waste Land,” the world economy evaporated.
Mixing aesthetic and political-economic critique, deWaard’s work is a mind-bending contribution to whatever is left of public-humanities criticism. He emphasizes that “one of the fundamental questions of this project is to ask what autumnal culture looks like,” and concludes that “it looks a lot like hip hop, reflexive comedy, and branded blockbusters: texts that are entrepreneurial, speculative, and, above all, derivative.”
More ominously, his conclusions are relevant to fields of cultural production, distribution, and consumption that he doesn’t have space for: Why is short, anti-intellectual Insta poetry most marketable now? Don’t ask critics or poets—ask Wall Street and what Kornbluh calls “algorithmic culture.” Kay Ryan is still alive, but most new readers prefer Rupi Kaur. “In the extremity of too late capitalism,” Kornbluh observes, “distance evaporates, thought ebbs, intensity gulps. Whatever. Like the meme says: get in, loser.”
Both the culture industries and the artworks they disgorge are “derivative,” in the double sense. On the one hand, they are literally financialized; on the other, they are increasingly boring, toothless, and antiradical.
Landlords are in control, breaking everything to bits and renting back to us at higher prices. And it is all worth a tremendous amount of money, at least to a few people, who are willing to kill the rest of us—and our cultures—to keep it.
Derivative Media concludes with a bold-faced set of pragmatic, social-democratic ways to break the grip of finance. We could, for example, tax billionaires more, or fight like hell for unionization, or close the “carried interest” loophole that only benefits hedge-fund and private-equity managers, or actually enforce antitrust legislation that is already on the books. (Indeed, under the Biden administration, Lina Khan was doing that at the Federal Trade Commission.) We could, deWaard writes, have “a less capitalist, more democratic organization of society [that] could be modeled in how we collectively allocate culture, in both how we access media and the labor that goes into making it.”
Of course, if we had the ability—as a politically functional society—to enact such reforms, we probably wouldn’t need them in the first place, and with Donald Trump resuming control of the White House, people like Lina Khan and possibilities like progressive tax reform are gone. What deWaard tentatively envisions will not happen. Things are probably going to get worse in art and media, because the python grip of capital is only getting stronger. We have what Kornbluh calls the “recycling of sopping content” to look forward to, with a few brilliant works financed by billionaires in the mix for the awards cycles. Fuck you, pay me.
So, what’s on tonight?
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