Financial constraints reduce creative production’s capacity for critique and diversity.
Evidence
- Qualitative. The adjective derivative is often used pejoratively, to judge an object as being unoriginal and thus of lesser quality. A common sentiment concerning contemporary popular culture is dissatisfaction with the predominance of endless franchise entries, repurposed beats and melodies, rebooted hits of yesteryear, comic book adaptations, and dopamine doses of nostalgia. While adaptation and transformative use of a previous work can no doubt produce meaningful cultural objects, repurposing something already successful is now the default, reducing the opportunities for experimental, radical, original, and complex work to achieve wider circulation beyond niche audiences. Derivative media, in this fifth instance, refers to the weakened state of creative production, its capacity to offer critique and diversity reduced as it suffers under the economic constraints of its new bosses on Wall Street. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 23
Categorization
- XREF: Gives the qualitative payoff the reader’s question asks for — whether finance causally shapes aesthetic form, here weakening it. — connects to: Finance transforms creative talent into a weapon of class war that entrenches inequality — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 409; Cost-cutting pressures shrink liberal arts offerings and undermine double majors — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 372