Spectacle and Diversity

Praise for Spectacle and Diversity: Transnational Media and Global Culture

"Lee Artz masterfully links the political economy of contemporary transnational entertainment media to substantive aspects of our highly mediated and densely saturated global entertainment culture. Artz reveals that our U.S.-centric categories are woefully inadequate. By looking at multiple regions, Artz addresses vast changes in global entertainment media’s division of labor, labor practices, financial, distributive, and consumption patterns. Artz’s work revives a "cultural industry" approach but Artz is far less speculative about cultures’ effects. Rather, he shows us how neoliberalism’s master frame suffuses the content of new cultural products. Artz’s book is an indispensable critical theory of the present; it aligns global media with an emergent global ideology for capital accumulation.’

Robert F. Carley, Texas A&M University, USA

A very comprehensive, extremely well-researched evidenced-based book for those who are interested to know transnational entertainment media’s hidden political economic agenda. With systematically relevant interesting examples, Artz unpacks how TNMCs through film and television present world views, beliefs, and values which support transnational capitalism and blind consumerism. A must read book for all those who consider themselves media scholars and activists.

Bushra Hameedur Rahman, University of the Punjab, Pakistan

"There is no one better than Lee Artz to examine the state of global media. In his latest work, Spectacle and Diversity: Transnational Media and Global Culture, Artz provides detailed analysis of media corporations by using the framework of transnational capitalism to challenge our understanding of cultural imperialism. Original, insightful, revealing and necessary reading for anyone interested in globalization, media, culture and political economy."

Jerry Harris, Director, Global Studies Association of North America

"It is what it´s not. This enigmatic catchphrase may be the dialectic key to understanding the critical perspective that stems out of Artz’s thorough analytical and empirical uncovering of transnational media corporations. His skilled and informed `unpacking’ of media containers reveals contemporary capitalist development--monopolies that concentrate their market power, political influence and cultural outreach—while our bodies, attention and expectations become the major source of an unprecedented and seemingly infinite, intangible accumulation of surplus value. Media rewrite domination as we click our bodies and souls to exhaustion and unlimited frustration. Whereas multinational corporations already surpassed the boundaries of national frontiers and labor exploitation, it is now capital as a spectacle of delusive diversity that continuously transforms itself into sameness and ludicrosity. Artz helps us understand why our stories `are still being told by someone else.’ That someone is actually the eternal return of the same, ghostly spirit of greed, accumulation and mass mediation taken to the extreme of apparent immediacy and passive acceptance of what is, but should not be."

Gilson Schwartz, University of São Paulo, Brazil

Praise for Spectacle and Diversity: Transnational Media and Global Culture

"Lee Artz masterfully links the political economy of contemporary transnational entertainment media to substantive aspects of our highly mediated and densely saturated global entertainment culture. Artz reveals that our U.S.-centric categories are woefully inadequate. By looking at multiple regions, Artz addresses vast changes in global entertainment media’s division of labor, labor practices, financial, distributive, and consumption patterns. Artz’s work revives a "cultural industry" approach but Artz is far less speculative about cultures’ effects. Rather, he shows us how neoliberalism’s master frame suffuses the content of new cultural products. Artz’s book is an indispensable critical theory of the present; it aligns global media with an emergent global ideology for capital accumulation.’

Robert F. Carley, Texas A&M University, USA

A very comprehensive, extremely well-researched evidenced-based book for those who are interested to know transnational entertainment media’s hidden political economic agenda. With systematically relevant interesting examples, Artz unpacks how TNMCs through film and television present world views, beliefs, and values which support transnational capitalism and blind consumerism. A must read book for all those who consider themselves media scholars and activists.

Bushra Hameedur Rahman, University of the Punjab, Pakistan

"There is no one better than Lee Artz to examine the state of global media. In his latest work, Spectacle and Diversity: Transnational Media and Global Culture, Artz provides detailed analysis of media corporations by using the framework of transnational capitalism to challenge our understanding of cultural imperialism. Original, insightful, revealing and necessary reading for anyone interested in globalization, media, culture and political economy."

Jerry Harris, Director, Global Studies Association of North America

"It is what it´s not. This enigmatic catchphrase may be the dialectic key to understanding the critical perspective that stems out of Artz’s thorough analytical and empirical uncovering of transnational media corporations. His skilled and informed `unpacking’ of media containers reveals contemporary capitalist development--monopolies that concentrate their market power, political influence and cultural outreach—while our bodies, attention and expectations become the major source of an unprecedented and seemingly infinite, intangible accumulation of surplus value. Media rewrite domination as we click our bodies and souls to exhaustion and unlimited frustration. Whereas multinational corporations already surpassed the boundaries of national frontiers and labor exploitation, it is now capital as a spectacle of delusive diversity that continuously transforms itself into sameness and ludicrosity. Artz helps us understand why our stories `are still being told by someone else.’ That someone is actually the eternal return of the same, ghostly spirit of greed, accumulation and mass mediation taken to the extreme of apparent immediacy and passive acceptance of what is, but should not be."

Gilson Schwartz, University of São Paulo, Brazil