Andrew deWaard

@adewaard.bsky.social

1126 Followers 140 Following

Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego "Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture" (UC Press, 2024) andrewdewaard.com | ucpress.edu/books/derivative-media | cultcap.org | macrolab.ucsd.edu

The Costs of Consolidation: Arguments and Evidence for Blocking the Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger

Best Book Award:
Andrew deWaard: Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture

Award Citation: Andrew deWaard's Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture is an urgently needed exploration and diagnosis of the ways in which private equity, hedge funds, derivatives, and other financial entities and logics have become central to the economic and creative functioning of Hollywood. Using interviews with studio executives and investors, financial filings, trade publications, and historical analyses of investment documents, deWaard posits that, 'financialization is a key structural force—perhaps the key structural force—shaping cultural production and circulation today.'

Crucial to the value of deWaard's project are his lucid explanations of how these new tools of finance have affected the decision-making processes of studio executives and how they are reflected in the types of projects that receive funding. deWaard also demonstrates how the logic of financialization manifests itself in movies, television programming, and popular music, highlighting how this relatively new model is operating at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. In addition, the project innovates methodologically, using data visualizations and digital humanities tools to further explicate the contemporary state of financialization. Through these frameworks, Derivative Media 'demonstrates that finance is not efficiently allocating our cultural resources; rather, it plunders our stories, songs, and creative labor through financial engineering.