Pumpkin
Spread 1
Spread 2
Close Ups
The Cultures and Globalization Series vol. 3
Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar Editors
Sage Publications, London
FESTIVALS: SEEKING ARTISTIC DISTINCTION IN A CROWDED FIELD
Dragan Klaic
This chapter argues that expectations of economic returns from international artistic festivals are highly exaggerated: only a handful among them actually generate such returns, thanks to factors such as location, size, tourist appeal and reputation. The author reviews the economic conditions of festival production in different regions of the world and pleads for public support, rather than tenuous sponsorship arrangements, as the key guarantor of stability and quality,. Festivals generate cultural capital but fail to grow it by using digital technology and building client loyalty among audiences. Public authorities rarely develop clear funding policies that set cultural, social and economic objectives for the festivals they support and provide criteria for monitoring, evaluation and funding decisions.
Despite a dizzying diversity of templates, concepts and programming solutions, all international artistic festivals reflect the general patterns of economic globalization in the way they distribute cultural goods and adjust the modalities of their own cultural production. They also play, within certain categories, disciplines and genres, a key role in the formation of perceived cultural value and in the establishment of a prestige hierarchy of cultural goods and their creators.
The recent rapid proliferation of international artistic festivals could in itself be seen as a consequence of globalization, insofar as it signals a pervasive form of imitative behavior – every self-respecting city nowadays strives to launch its own festival or even a panoply of festivals of different sorts, spread throughout the year (Noordman 2005). If festivals were in the past instigated chiefly by visionary individuals or prestigious cultural institutions, with the purpose of compensating for what the regular cultural season could not offer or to celebrate artistic excellence on an international scale, festivals today are often politically inspired and enter into the political marketing of particular politicians or parties. The prestige, large audiences, media attention and thus high visibility of festivals cater to the self-celebratory needs of politics (Hunyadi 2006).
Excessive economic expectations
Increasingly, political support and public funding are offered to artistic festivals on the expectation of an economic benefit. The first festivals established after the Second World War were envisaged as being beneficial for cultural life, even as celebrations of peace and post-war reconciliation (Autissier 2006) . Today, they are rationalized predominantly as beneficial for the local economy. They are expected to boost employment and inward investment, increase tourist visits, and stimulate additional spending, thus reinforcing the positive branding of the city and its destination marketing campaigns. In thus adopting the economic rationale of the prevailing political discourse festival operators tend to exaggerate the economic impact of their festivals when seeking public subsidies. While they remain dependent on those subsidies, they shift their case from the emancipatory ideology of culture and general welfare state rhetoric to the presumed economic benefits. The reformulation of the expected impact reflects the decentralization of cultural policy, with cities becoming the key public funders of cultural activities instead of national governments, but also escalating competition among cities themselves.
Yet this putative economic impact remains mostly in the murky zone of wishful thinking, belief and speculation. Economic impact studies are unreliable and most often commissioned by the stakeholders themselves in order to provide proof for a predetermined positive conclusion (Vrettos 2006). If hard data on positive economic impact cannot be obtained, a vague assumption is made that festivals nevertheless indirectly generate some economic benefit by boosting the image of the place and supporting its destination marketing strategy. The problem is that even if visitor numbers and spending increase, it is difficult to trace this growth directly to the festival operation and exclude all other variables. It can well be assumed that many festivals, especially in smaller places, redistribute the existing financial resources within the local economy. They can indeed deliver earnings to local restaurants, cafes, hotels and taxi drivers, printers and designers, for example, but much of the fees and salaries earned actually leaves the locality, as the recipients reside elsewhere. The employment opportunities created by festivals are limited and short-term because most festivals run just for a week or two and increasingly rely on volunteers.
The relationship between artistic festivals and the tourist industry is complex and problematic. In some places, festivals are able to upgrade the tourist offer and attract more affluent tourists who spend more. In cities that are major tourist destinations already, such as London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro or Cairo, holding a festival can have only a limited impact, measured in year-around city turnover from tourism. The visitors these festivals attract are a miniscule part of the overall visitor mass. Some smaller places with a large volume of visitors generate a significant part of their tourist income in the weeks of a festival’s duration, for example Avignon, Spoleto or the Dutch island of Terschelling with its Oerol festival (Twaalfhoven 2007). Festivals are in general beneficial for tourism but the tourist boom is not always beneficial for festivals. The recovery of Dubrovnik, Croatia, a decade after 1991-1995 war destruction and isolation, has brought mass tourism, of a kind that is totally indifferent to the programming of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival established in 1950. The summer crowds and their noise push the festival performances outside the medieval urban core, away from those medieval fortresses, squares and palaces that served as their initial inspiration and prime location.
In the case of some festivals it is simply assumed that they have a significant economic impact, such as Avignon, Edinburgh and Salzburg. For the first two, their non-selective, open programming (Avignon Off with over 700 productions and Edinburgh Fringe with more than 2000 productions), parallel to the official program, increases the economic impact due to a large number of participants and not just spectators. Many of Avignon Festival visitors are day trippers who vacation in Provence and come into the town to see one or two performances only, walk around, shop, have a drink or a meal. The regional concentration of this mass of vacationers benefits Avignon but also sustains some 400 smaller festivals held in the south of France every summer, often with just a few thousand tickets sold – in contrast to the 120, 000 tickets sold for the official Avignon Festival program. (Festival d’Avignon 2003).
The Salzburg Festival
This festival’s prestige translates into snob appeal and results in impressive box office income of € 24.27 million, and € 6.41 million in ‘other’ income (merchandising, royalties, subsidiary rights), against which generous government subsidies of €12.82 million present only 28 per cent of the total budget of € 45.8 million. If one assumes that for every euro spent at the Festspiele box office an average visitor spends another € 4 in town for food, lodging, drinks, and shopping, the Festival generates at least € 97 million on top of the box office income and perhaps much more. This arithmetic makes the cartel of local restaurant and hotel owners a powerful group of stakeholders, ready to unabashedly meddle in the artistic matters of the Festival program, fearful that any esthetic change might alienate the conservative elites on whose spending their income depends. Consequently, they fought Gerard Mortier’s programming choices with venom, their apparent cultural traditionalism resting on sound economic self-interest.
The proportions between public subsidy and earned income and between the festival total budget and the economic benefit generated to Salzburg are unique and cannot be replicated elsewhere. Because of the unique socio-cultural value attached to the Festival, a very high number of wealthy visitors are willing to come and pay high ticket prices while the same prestige keeps the public authorities willing to continue with a high subsidy. Surprisingly, sponsorship participation in the budget amounts to meager € 2.29 million, or just 5 per cent, less than many smaller and more modest festivals are able to generate. With the public authorities lending a generous subsidy and with the rich queuing to pay for expensive tickets, the Festspiele leaders do not have to put much energy in the recruitment of sponsors. At least, not yet.
Many Asian cities are reluctant to reveal any financial information concerning their festivals, whether publicly or privately funded, so that their proportions remain difficult to assess and compare. While in China artistic festivals rely on government support (also in Macao, but not in Hong Kong), in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan private initiative keeps festivals in business (Darmawan et al. 2005) . In Australia, veteran festivals in Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney originally delivered mainstream European high culture, mostly British, to nostalgic immigrant elites. These festivals were made possible through a combination of private sponsorship and limited public support that nevertheless shifted programming concepts from a post-colonial mode to a celebration of multiculturalism and exploration of cultural diversity, especially among Pacific neighbors. In Latin America, artistic festivals with international programming remain a rarity in comparison to other fiestas and programmed crowd gathering events such as the Rio de Janeiro Carnival (cf. the chapter by Paulo Miguez). Some once well-known festivals continue on stubbornly (Festival Cervantino, Guanajuato) or are now defunct (Caracas, Venezuela). The extensive programming of the International Theater Festival of Bogotá, Colombia, with almost 50 foreign visiting companies in 2006, is exceptional Its existence in such an impoverished country, ravaged by guerilla and mass kidnappings, with hardly any articulated cultural policy, can be explained only by the convenience it offers to the narco-cartels to combine money laundering with the acquisition of some goodwill among the local people, who are offered free access to lavish events in stadiums and parks.
Artistic festivals remain a rarity in the Arab world because of economic and political factors. The governments are reluctant to invest in them and sponsors are rare, while both official censorship and religious Puritanism create additional obstacles. The Cairo and Amman international theater festivals do not engage in their own programming, but ask foreign governments to send (and pay for) productions of their choice which they then feature and host without a fee. This minimalism leads to incoherent artistic results but at least in Cairo censorship takes a step back and allows for an evening or two some foreign productions that it would never permit outside the festival setting. Hence an enormous public interest for things foreign that are just not available at any other time. After the end of the civil war in Lebanon, some rich hoteliers stimulated the renewal of dance and music festivals, in order to re-build quality tourism and appeal to Western visitors. (Johnson 2004). The new hostilities with Israel in the summer of 2006 and the ensuing instability have frustrated these efforts, yet another Baalbek International festival was announced with an impressive array of local and international sponsors for the summer of 2007. In contrast, the Theatre of the Oppressed Season under the title ‘Building Bridges… Breaking Barriers’, which took place in seven Palestinian cities in April 2007, was a mini-festival with Palestinian, German, Spanish and Brazilian companies, made possible by NGO support. It generated no economic impact but had great cultural and political significance, displaying the other face of globalization: the acceleration and intensification of exemplary gestures of solidarity with isolated and oppressed communities.
The logic of prestige
Since the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games a rich cultural program has become a standard feature of the Games, as an artistic festival that runs parallel with the sports events. There is little evidence that fans of the sports disciplines favor particular artistic forms but these Olympic festivals are being conceived in the logic of prestige and programmatic overkill, not as part of a marketing strategy. The businessmen who stood behind the Los Angeles Olympics were quick to cancel chunks of the cultural program when the threat of an overall deficit loomed. Nevertheless, they encouraged other cities hosting the Olympics to stretch their cultural ambitions and set the precedent for the subsequent Peter Sellars’ festival adventures (1990-93), celebrating the link between the cultures of the Pacific rim and their diasporic communities in the Los Angeles area. Coming after a few short lived international performing arts festivals in Baltimore and Denver, the Los Angeles event succeeded in lowering the prejudice against foreign language performances in the US and created a climate of curiosity that enabled subsequent international festivals in New York, such as the New Wave in the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Lincoln Center Summer Festival, to take off and bring in the foremost contemporary artists and their work.
These large events are run on modest local public subsidies and a great deal of sponsorship and private donations but would not be possible at all without the subsidies of the foreign governments that support their artistic ensembles as representatives of the national culture. Because access to the prestigious New York City venues appeared to be crowded and expensive, the Dutch government subsidized in 2007 an entire summer festival called ‘NL: a Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires’, stretched over the hills of Western Massachusetts, between the Tanglewood music festival and the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival, on the assumption that part of the New York cultural elite spends its vacation in the area. The rationale is not just the affirmation of national prestige via culture but is also based on the expectation that this condensed package will create more demand for Dutch arts in the US that will one day be satisfied on more commercial terms and with less need for government support. An illusion, for sure, because the cash-strapped US presenters continue to pay low fees. Yet those working in New York and a few other US cities profit, together with their Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai and Sao Paolo counterparts, from their prestige status: they are where everyone wants to be, the artists and especially the prestige- hungry governments.
The same prestige obsession, focused locally rather than abroad, has kept alive the European Cultural Capital scheme, initiated by the European Union and premiered in Athens in 1985. Since then, every year one, later two or three cities (but nine in 2000!) are allowed to carry the label and to organize a year long mega-festival. The EU contribution of roughly 1.5 per cent of the total budget on average pales into insignificance against the huge investment of the national, regional and local authorities (around 80 per cent), modest earned income and sponsorship in varying amounts. Since Glasgow (1990), this label has been seen as an opportunity for major infrastructural investment (sometimes completed after the end of the festive year!) and consequently the budgets keep rising. In the northern French city of Lille, for example, in 2004, the budget was € 74 million. Frequently the promised economic benefits and the expected masses of visitors do not materialize and the slight increase in external expenditure and hotel nights ebbs away in a year or two, while the local audiences quickly tire of the avalanche of international programming (Palmer 2004). Whatever image making hocus pocus is attempted, city reputations do not get essentially altered with just one year of heightened cultural life. Paris, Florence, Amsterdam, Prague, Barcelona or even small Weimar retain all the cultural references they had before obtaining the label, while cultural backwaters such as Luxemburg, Patras or Sibiu do not become transformed into favorite visitor destinations or into influential laboratories of cultural production.
Mainstream limitations and alternative responses
The proliferation of artistic festivals adds to the ongoing commodification of artistic works as cultural goods, offered in large programmatic packages, made to create an impression of plenty, diversity and richness, as a seductive bazaar or emporium of artistic creativity and talent, where lesser known names can piggyback the allure of the famous. Regardless of their artistic discipline or the multi/interdisciplinary character of their programming, international artistic festivals embody the art of packaging in the first instance, the mastery of bricolage, of composition and fusion in how their programs are put together (de Wend Fenton et al 2005). Most festival programmers have insufficient travel budgets, so they are forced to program not on the basis of broad insight into new artistic production and their own first-hand experience but more on rumor, gossip and opportunity – in other words according to whether some authority such as a ministry, a government agency, British Council or a Goethe Institute, or a conveniently identified sponsor, is willing to pay for a particular company:
In the dense logistic of the artistic festivals, companies and artists move in and out of town or appear at various locations during the same evening, competing for the attention of both spectators and the media, often hardly distinguishable one from the other while they take each other’s place. Equally, they are all quite decontextualized from their own original creative circumstances, made dependent on the marketing slang of the festival brochures and framed as exclusive goods that can be consumed only in the limited time allowed by the rhythm of the festival program (Sabate 2004).
In the performing arts, some experts claim to be able to recognize productions specifically made to appear on the festival circuit, in accordance with prevailing fashions and fads – such works are usually made to be quite easy, communicative, appealing, visually rich and less dependent on the spoken language in order to reduce the hassle of translation. At the same time, surtitling has facilitated the touring of language-based productions from one festival to another. Successful theater productions appear sometimes at a dozen festivals within a year or two, provoking complaints by critics that all festivals increasingly resemble each other. They forget, however, that festival audiences are much less mobile than theater professionals and critics.
In the world of feature film festivals, where commercial interests prevail, the presence of stars and their glamour serve to sustain media attention and engineer success, so as to facilitate background business transactions and the packaging of new film co-productions. In the consensual hierarchy of film festivals, their prizes have a specific commercial impact, with Venice and Cannes in the forefront, and Moscow, Toronto, Rotterdam and Chicago following closely behind.
Classical music festivals focus on the rather coherent and static music repertory of the last 200 years, but also on a tacit hierarchy of artists, ensembles and orchestras, derived from a limited set of references: who trained with whom, won which prizes, worked with which conductor or director, appeared on which opera stage or concert hall. These career markers determine the prestige of artists and of the festivals that program them and are also reflected in the appropriate fee scale, sometimes also in the range of ticket prices.
In contrast to those habitually subsidized events, commercial rock and pop music festivals nestle within specific music idioms and seek to capitalize on the groups and musicians who provide clear brand recognition, supported by an extensive line of merchandising. The growing popularity of ‘world music’ as a heterogeneous genre has enabled some festivals to shift gradually from non-profit to for-profit logic, with a steep rise in audience numbers that enables more programming. This inevitably turns previously obscure music phenomena and their practitioners, once marketed for their exoticism and supposed authenticity, into stars capable of setting global fashions and covering festival costs without public subsidy.
And yet, there are also festival niches that resist commodification, privilege surprise and excitement over perfect logistics and deliberately seek marginality or liminality against media overexposure. Those are small, usually short festivals in remote and not easily accessible locations, in the post-industrial debris of abandoned factories, in slums or in rural areas. These self-styled and self-propelled alternatives shun public support and sponsorship, stage unexpected performances in a zone of temporary autonomy, make underground creativity visible briefly for a relatively small audience of cognoscenti and fellow travelers, alerted via internet sites and SMS messages. The interest of the audience is to attempt to step out of globalization into something very local, very specific and of short duration but meaningful in terms of extraordinary experience, unavailable elsewhere. Even when they feature international artists, such festivals remain deliberately local in their context and impact, creating a cultural opposition to the more globalized spaces of cultural consumption, set in the centers of prestige and public attention.
While official artistic festivals abound in China, endowed with public subsidies of regional and municipal authorities, eager to jump on the globalization bandwagon and propelled by an increased willingness of corporations to sponsor them, small unofficial festivals, lasting only 2-3 days, pop up in Beijing and Shanghai, on the urban margins, without any visible support, in unconventional and obscure places, offering a sense of adventure to the participating artists, both Chinese and foreign, and small audiences. These occasional events avoid the official scrutiny of cultural programming by the authorities and at the same time counter the growing commercial orientation of both public and private cultural organizations. They leave hardly any traces, stay out of media attention and guard the anonymity of their teams. (Klaic 2007)
Unstable sponsors and under-explored recycling
International artistic festival differ much in their operating budget, degree of public subsidy vs. own income, duration, number of program features and audience volume. Some are autonomous non-profit organizations, others are spin offs of permanent cultural institutions that once a year at least aim to produce something different, special and eminently international. Increasingly, municipalities are setting up specialized agencies to invent and run f festivals of different format and type on a consistently professional level of production, communication and marketing (Silvanto 2007).
Those international festivals that have an evident artistic core and primary artistic purpose -- in contrast to commercial crowd-gathering events and community celebrations, where artistic work might have a mere decorative and entertainment function – almost inevitably depend on public subsidy to safeguard and advance their artistic ambitions. Even artistic festivals operating in the non-profit logic experience shifts in their economy as they seek to compensate shrinking subsidies with sponsorship and more earned income. Sponsorship deals tend to be short-lasting and in some instances unstable relations with sponsors imperil continuity. Big world brands appear as common festival sponsors, but tend to be led by the logic of local market opportunities. The competition of corporations for chief sponsor’s role is rare: the famous rivalry of Sbirbank and Nestle for the sponsorship of the Golden Mask festival, won by the former while the latter accepted the role of a secondary sponsor, remains an exception, explainable by specific Moscow circumstances, of a big, hot consumer market with too few prominent large-scale festivals that are suitable for sponsorship. Everywhere, sponsorship is a conceivable options for festivals that are big, have considerable exposure and audience volume and are consequently rather mainstream, if not conventional or elitist in their artistic program. The best strategy of smaller festivals is to turn their business associates and regular providers of goods and services into sponsors in kind, e.g. printers, accountants, lawyers, travel agencies, taxi companies, cafés and caterers… In countries where the government occasionally funds but regularly controls cultural productions, festivals that do not receive government subsidy cannot expect to find a sponsor either, while the awarding of government subsidy makes them in principle safe for sponsors, as in Singapore, where the National Art Council appears as the festival organizer, production subsidy distributor, censor and landlord.
As periodically reoccurring events, festivals find it difficult to sustain client loyalty from one edition to another but most of them still do not use the internet sufficiently as a platform on which to build a virtual community of hardcore fans and offer them a steady flow of information, services and products to create loyalty. In big cities with rich cultural offerings, most festival goers see only one or two program features – despite festival marketing that seeks to convey the entire program as something exceptional and unique. This signals that festivals are competing with all other culture producers for the limited attention of the public, itself overwhelmed with constantly increased cultural consumption options.
In the performing arts, including music, festivals increasingly appear as producers and not only as presenters. They pool resources and share risks with other producers, festivals and venues in order to make available new artistic work that could hardly be conceivable in the regular production of the theaters, operas and music halls, leading to surprising combinations of artistic talent and requiring budgets that no producer could provide alone. Such co-productions guarantee a longer series of performances and sufficient exposure for a secondary circuit of programmers to consider programming the production at some later time.
Festivals thus create and not only distribute cultural capital. Yet they do not pursue existing and emerging technological opportunities sufficiently to recycle it through digital platforms and reach a secondary audience in protracted time and expanded space. They underestimate the economic ‘window of opportunity’ made available by globalization and ICT revolution, as well as the chance to further legitimize public subsidies through digital educational applications derived from the live festival program. Only in the UK does the formulation of educational and outreach programs appear as a mandatory precondition for the granting of public subsidies. One might expect that with increased competition for subsidies elsewhere, those cultural operators who offer additional educational benefit from their cultural and artistic programming would be more likely to be recipients of public funds. Festivals are always chiefly local endeavors in their cultural, economic and social impact, but digital recycling offers them a chance to achieve a global presence as co-producers and distributors.
Local partnerships and alliances bring sustainability
Despite international programming and globalized reputations, festivals remain quite dependent on local circumstances – audience reception, political support, media coverage and loyalty or hostility of local artistic communities. Increased competition among cities underlines competition among festivals -- for prestige, prominent artists, media attention, sponsors and visitors. Locally, it seems that festivals able to forge a wide range of partnerships with domestic stakeholders tend to prosper and in some cases enhance the collaborative attitudes of cultural and educational organizations, the media, businesses and NGOs, thus becoming key contributors to local development. However, this prominent exposure exposes them to the imperative of permanent growth and forces them to prove that they can produce more programs, reach more audiences, secure more sponsorship and generate more minutes of electronic media attention. This unlimited growth is, however, unsustainable and even well-positioned festivals, with many associations and partnerships, could find themselves under the pressure of escalating and mutually incompatible expectations that ultimately engender frustration, disappointment and opposition.
It is conceivable that international artistic festivals will get caught in the cross fire between forces of globalization that seek to mainstream them and make them conform to successful formulae and commercial events, and defenders of the specifically local, and that they will in the process frustrate the expectations of both, thus provoking two-sided hostility. Local cultural elites and artistic communities may perceive a home festival as the importer of dangerous, subversive, contaminating cultural goods and as a peddler of effete foreign ware. At the same time, festivals might be reproached for not doing enough to appreciate, elevate and promote local creative talents and impulses internationally.
Older, established and prestigious festivals have discovered that prestige alone cannot ensure their vitality or guarantee the continuity of high public funding they used to take for granted. Neither can accumulated prestige hide fatigue and routine that undermine their credibility among audiences, always eager to experience something new and different. Fellow professionals, peers and colleagues appear as the most dangerous critics and their impatience with the ‘business as usual’ attitude could become quite dangerous (Hansen 2004).
Festivals of classical music appear to be increasingly disoriented by rapidly graying audiences, the collapse of the recording industry and the flight of traditional sponsors. Taken together these factors seriously endanger their financial equilibrium, made worse by rising costs, especially in the form of hefty fees for leading artists. It is increasingly difficult to find programming distinction within the constraints of a fairly narrow classical music repertory, whose core is made up of European music composed between 1750 and 1950. Paradoxically, thanks to digital copying and high capacity carriers, more people listen to more music than ever before, but festivals of classical music are finding it quite difficult to turn this situation to their advantage (Négrier 2006)..
That a top of the range MP3 player can contain today the programs of all classical music festivals held in the course of a single summer means that an average listener can with little effort and minimal cost function as his own programmer and secure a broader range of music than any single festival. This should be seen as an alerting signal and prompt programming innovation and genre mixture in order to make festivals profit from the eclectic music taste of the baby boomers, who remain loyal to their formative rock music experiences even as they turn into senior citizens – but invest their cosmopolitanism in the exploration of world music, while their preferences within the classical music repertory remain undifferentiated or, on the contrary, focused on some specific niche. Festivals that stubbornly perpetuate a classic repertory without experimentation, surprising mixtures and commissioning of new music might end up as the big losers, despite their reputation and tradition. Small classical music festivals, driven by the passion and enthusiasm of a circle of music lovers and developed throughout the summer in unusual settings, such as small village churches in popular vacation regions of France, show growth and good interactions with the local tourist industry.
Many festivals thrive in a clearly defined programming niche and derive their strength from a coherent concept and context, from a local loyalty of volunteers and collaborating partners, from programming that is consistent yet offers participative opportunities. Festivals that phrase their artistic program in terms of a social agenda, referring to gender, migration, exclusion, marginality, and festivals that explore their urban context, making the urbanity both the topic and the context, seem to be successful as well as festivals of new media that test the audience’s habits and preferences and challenge it with new capabilities and modes of interactivity.
Those festivals that have avoided being labeled a tacit ally of the forces of globalization but instead bring globalization into their programming philosophy, not as a fatality but as a phenomenon that provokes the articulation of a critical discourse, are as a rule doing well and finding partners and allies, locally and internationally. While some festivals complain of rising costs, not matched adequately by public subsidies, sponsorship and ticket sales, in some parts of the world successful festivals are still being put together on a shoestring budget, with much free work and donated services and goods and very little cash expenditure, but with international artists participating without a fee, out of a sense of adventure or solidarity.
The need for festival policies
The rapidly growing number of festivals, often in the same place, creates dilemmas for the pubic authorities: which ones to support, why and with how much? Public authorities need therefore to articulate a firm festival policy with precise objectives, goals, funding criteria and monitoring and evaluation procedures. Otherwise, they will continue to dwell in the prevailing practice of incidental and arbitrary decisions, serving steady and re-occurring clients, rich in tradition and prestige, and shortchanging new, disgruntled applicants who promise more results for less money. Very few cities, regions and national ministries for culture or funding agencies have attempted to develop such policies; private foundations, often instrumental in festival funding, have not done so either.
On the international level, there is not much policy-making that could be suggested or expected, especially as national governments jealously consider culture as their exclusive realm of competence. UNESCO, the Asia-Europe Foundation and the Anna Lindh Foundation for Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation, inter alia, could develop ways to support festivals not so much for their expected economic benefits (because they will in most cases not be achieved) but primarily as instruments of artistic, cultural and social development, inclusion through new audience development and innovation in cultural practices. They may decide to support festivals that can develop the spirit of partnership and broad local alliance-building and enhance the intercultural competencies of both cultural operators and audiences. The European Union has recognized the value of artistic mobility and made possible in its culture program more international co-productions with the participation of different festivals, but frustrates the growing ambitions and productive ingenuity of cultural operators by its miniscule budget and heavy-handed administrative requirements.
Conclusions
Artistic festivals remain chiefly a local affair -- despite the international component in their programming, success or failure depends on local entrepeneurship, the capability to engage various local constituencies and the capacity to turn the dialectic of the global and local to their advantage rather than against it The impacts are also chiefly local and lie predominantly in the artistic, cultural and social sphere, not in the generation of economic benefit, as is often assumed. Direct economic impact is a privilege of very few festivals whose programming formula and public appeal are reinforced by an advantageous location, a certain festival mythology and ample public subsidies.
Hosting many foreign artists in a condensed programming frame benefits local artists and audiences and offers opportunities to innovate as regards cultural practices, expand the audience base and create new partnerships among local players. Public authorities that support artists and artistic ensembles to travel to foreign festivals are mainly driven by prestige considerations but in fact they support the development of artistic excellence through mobility and ultimately local audiences as well.
Artistic festivals function in a context determined by globalized economic pressures that impose a uniformization of artistic practices and the commodification of the cultural goods created and featured. Due to the increased competition of consumer options within limited leisure time, any cluster of events now often calls itself a festival in order to convey some exceptional significance. This is often an isolated marketing gimmick rather than a sustained and consistent programming strategy. Yet artistic festivals can respond productively to such pressures: by the flexible modification of programming formulae, or the inclusion of social issues, through international co-productions and the digital recycling of cultural capital, by forging solid local alliances. They can also turn globalization itself into the subject of festival narratives and critical discourse.
Retrenching public authorities see private sponsorship as a panacea for shrinking pubic subsides instead of developing consistent festival funding policies. But festivals will depend increasingly on local subsides and support bases which they can reinforce through their international reputation and prestige. On the international scale, major festivals will probably form consortia to produce exceptional high-budget works, ensure their proper exposure and prolonged exploitation through digital spin offs, thus reinforcing their own dominant position in the dense festival jungle.
REFERENCES
Autissier, A-M. et . al. (2006) Still so much to be done. Challenges for Culture in Europe. Gent: European Festivals Association.
Darmawan, D., Boitano, J. & Liang, Y. (2005). “The Programmatic Interests and Financing Modalities of Festivals in East Asia”. Leiden University School of Management MBA thesis.
De Wend Fenton, R., Neal, L. et. al. (2005) The Turning World. Stories from the LIFT. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK.
Festival d’Avignon (2003). Alternatives théâtrales 78-79 (2003).
Hansen, K. et. al. (2004) Festivals: Challenges of Growth, Distinction, Support Base and Internationalization. Tartu: Cultural Department, City of Tartu; also available on www.tartu.ee/festivalbook
Hunyadi, Z. Inkei, P., Szabo, J.Z. (2006). Festivál-vilag. Budapest: Kulturpoint iroda/ Budapest Observatory.
Johnson, K. & Nelson , K. eds. (2004) Staging Independence. Mutual Strategies for Directors and Theatremakers in Europe and in the Arab World. London: Directors Guild of Great Britain.
Klaic D. (2007) ’Chinese performing arts: from communist to globalised kitsch’. IIAS Newsletter 44 (summer 2007), 18-19.
Négrier, E. et Jourda, M—T. (avec la collaboration de Pierre Négrier). (2006) Les Nouveaux territoires des festivals. Un état des lieux pour la musique et la danse. Paris : FRANCE FESTIVALS.
Noordman, T.B., Kroes, M. & de Graauw, C.A.H. (2005). Festivals en gemeentlijk beleid in Nederland. Rotterdam: RISBO/Erasmus Universiteit.
Palmer, R. (2004) European Cultural Capitals. A study for the European Commission. Brussels: Palmer & Rae (www.palmer-rae.com).
Sabate, J., Frenchman, D., & Schuster, J.M (2004) LLocs amb esdevenimentes/ Event Places. Barcelona: International Laboratory on Cultural Landscapes.
Silvanto, S. ed. (2007) Festivaalien Helsinki: Helsinki: HPK/HKK.
Twaalfhoven, A., Schmitz, J. & Deuss, B. (2007). Luchtig en toch verlicht. Theater maken in de zomer. Den Haag: FAPK.
Vrettos, A. (2006) Economic Impact of Arts & Culture Festivals. A Comparative Analysis of 4 Economic Impact Studies. Maastricht: University of Maastricht MA thesis.
NB. The European Festival Research Project (EFRP), an international consortium, makes festival research outcomes publicly accessible on the website of the European Festival Association: http://www.efa-aef.org/efahome/efrp.cfm
Spread 2
Close Ups
The Cultures and Globalization Series vol. 3
Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation
Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar EditorsSage Publications, London
FESTIVALS: SEEKING ARTISTIC DISTINCTION IN A CROWDED FIELD
Dragan Klaic
This chapter argues that expectations of economic returns from international artistic festivals are highly exaggerated: only a handful among them actually generate such returns, thanks to factors such as location, size, tourist appeal and reputation. The author reviews the economic conditions of festival production in different regions of the world and pleads for public support, rather than tenuous sponsorship arrangements, as the key guarantor of stability and quality,. Festivals generate cultural capital but fail to grow it by using digital technology and building client loyalty among audiences. Public authorities rarely develop clear funding policies that set cultural, social and economic objectives for the festivals they support and provide criteria for monitoring, evaluation and funding decisions.
Despite a dizzying diversity of templates, concepts and programming solutions, all international artistic festivals reflect the general patterns of economic globalization in the way they distribute cultural goods and adjust the modalities of their own cultural production. They also play, within certain categories, disciplines and genres, a key role in the formation of perceived cultural value and in the establishment of a prestige hierarchy of cultural goods and their creators.
The recent rapid proliferation of international artistic festivals could in itself be seen as a consequence of globalization, insofar as it signals a pervasive form of imitative behavior – every self-respecting city nowadays strives to launch its own festival or even a panoply of festivals of different sorts, spread throughout the year (Noordman 2005). If festivals were in the past instigated chiefly by visionary individuals or prestigious cultural institutions, with the purpose of compensating for what the regular cultural season could not offer or to celebrate artistic excellence on an international scale, festivals today are often politically inspired and enter into the political marketing of particular politicians or parties. The prestige, large audiences, media attention and thus high visibility of festivals cater to the self-celebratory needs of politics (Hunyadi 2006).
Excessive economic expectations
Increasingly, political support and public funding are offered to artistic festivals on the expectation of an economic benefit. The first festivals established after the Second World War were envisaged as being beneficial for cultural life, even as celebrations of peace and post-war reconciliation (Autissier 2006) . Today, they are rationalized predominantly as beneficial for the local economy. They are expected to boost employment and inward investment, increase tourist visits, and stimulate additional spending, thus reinforcing the positive branding of the city and its destination marketing campaigns. In thus adopting the economic rationale of the prevailing political discourse festival operators tend to exaggerate the economic impact of their festivals when seeking public subsidies. While they remain dependent on those subsidies, they shift their case from the emancipatory ideology of culture and general welfare state rhetoric to the presumed economic benefits. The reformulation of the expected impact reflects the decentralization of cultural policy, with cities becoming the key public funders of cultural activities instead of national governments, but also escalating competition among cities themselves.
Yet this putative economic impact remains mostly in the murky zone of wishful thinking, belief and speculation. Economic impact studies are unreliable and most often commissioned by the stakeholders themselves in order to provide proof for a predetermined positive conclusion (Vrettos 2006). If hard data on positive economic impact cannot be obtained, a vague assumption is made that festivals nevertheless indirectly generate some economic benefit by boosting the image of the place and supporting its destination marketing strategy. The problem is that even if visitor numbers and spending increase, it is difficult to trace this growth directly to the festival operation and exclude all other variables. It can well be assumed that many festivals, especially in smaller places, redistribute the existing financial resources within the local economy. They can indeed deliver earnings to local restaurants, cafes, hotels and taxi drivers, printers and designers, for example, but much of the fees and salaries earned actually leaves the locality, as the recipients reside elsewhere. The employment opportunities created by festivals are limited and short-term because most festivals run just for a week or two and increasingly rely on volunteers.
The relationship between artistic festivals and the tourist industry is complex and problematic. In some places, festivals are able to upgrade the tourist offer and attract more affluent tourists who spend more. In cities that are major tourist destinations already, such as London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro or Cairo, holding a festival can have only a limited impact, measured in year-around city turnover from tourism. The visitors these festivals attract are a miniscule part of the overall visitor mass. Some smaller places with a large volume of visitors generate a significant part of their tourist income in the weeks of a festival’s duration, for example Avignon, Spoleto or the Dutch island of Terschelling with its Oerol festival (Twaalfhoven 2007). Festivals are in general beneficial for tourism but the tourist boom is not always beneficial for festivals. The recovery of Dubrovnik, Croatia, a decade after 1991-1995 war destruction and isolation, has brought mass tourism, of a kind that is totally indifferent to the programming of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival established in 1950. The summer crowds and their noise push the festival performances outside the medieval urban core, away from those medieval fortresses, squares and palaces that served as their initial inspiration and prime location.
In the case of some festivals it is simply assumed that they have a significant economic impact, such as Avignon, Edinburgh and Salzburg. For the first two, their non-selective, open programming (Avignon Off with over 700 productions and Edinburgh Fringe with more than 2000 productions), parallel to the official program, increases the economic impact due to a large number of participants and not just spectators. Many of Avignon Festival visitors are day trippers who vacation in Provence and come into the town to see one or two performances only, walk around, shop, have a drink or a meal. The regional concentration of this mass of vacationers benefits Avignon but also sustains some 400 smaller festivals held in the south of France every summer, often with just a few thousand tickets sold – in contrast to the 120, 000 tickets sold for the official Avignon Festival program. (Festival d’Avignon 2003).
The Salzburg Festival
This festival’s prestige translates into snob appeal and results in impressive box office income of € 24.27 million, and € 6.41 million in ‘other’ income (merchandising, royalties, subsidiary rights), against which generous government subsidies of €12.82 million present only 28 per cent of the total budget of € 45.8 million. If one assumes that for every euro spent at the Festspiele box office an average visitor spends another € 4 in town for food, lodging, drinks, and shopping, the Festival generates at least € 97 million on top of the box office income and perhaps much more. This arithmetic makes the cartel of local restaurant and hotel owners a powerful group of stakeholders, ready to unabashedly meddle in the artistic matters of the Festival program, fearful that any esthetic change might alienate the conservative elites on whose spending their income depends. Consequently, they fought Gerard Mortier’s programming choices with venom, their apparent cultural traditionalism resting on sound economic self-interest.
The proportions between public subsidy and earned income and between the festival total budget and the economic benefit generated to Salzburg are unique and cannot be replicated elsewhere. Because of the unique socio-cultural value attached to the Festival, a very high number of wealthy visitors are willing to come and pay high ticket prices while the same prestige keeps the public authorities willing to continue with a high subsidy. Surprisingly, sponsorship participation in the budget amounts to meager € 2.29 million, or just 5 per cent, less than many smaller and more modest festivals are able to generate. With the public authorities lending a generous subsidy and with the rich queuing to pay for expensive tickets, the Festspiele leaders do not have to put much energy in the recruitment of sponsors. At least, not yet.
Many Asian cities are reluctant to reveal any financial information concerning their festivals, whether publicly or privately funded, so that their proportions remain difficult to assess and compare. While in China artistic festivals rely on government support (also in Macao, but not in Hong Kong), in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan private initiative keeps festivals in business (Darmawan et al. 2005) . In Australia, veteran festivals in Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney originally delivered mainstream European high culture, mostly British, to nostalgic immigrant elites. These festivals were made possible through a combination of private sponsorship and limited public support that nevertheless shifted programming concepts from a post-colonial mode to a celebration of multiculturalism and exploration of cultural diversity, especially among Pacific neighbors. In Latin America, artistic festivals with international programming remain a rarity in comparison to other fiestas and programmed crowd gathering events such as the Rio de Janeiro Carnival (cf. the chapter by Paulo Miguez). Some once well-known festivals continue on stubbornly (Festival Cervantino, Guanajuato) or are now defunct (Caracas, Venezuela). The extensive programming of the International Theater Festival of Bogotá, Colombia, with almost 50 foreign visiting companies in 2006, is exceptional Its existence in such an impoverished country, ravaged by guerilla and mass kidnappings, with hardly any articulated cultural policy, can be explained only by the convenience it offers to the narco-cartels to combine money laundering with the acquisition of some goodwill among the local people, who are offered free access to lavish events in stadiums and parks.
Artistic festivals remain a rarity in the Arab world because of economic and political factors. The governments are reluctant to invest in them and sponsors are rare, while both official censorship and religious Puritanism create additional obstacles. The Cairo and Amman international theater festivals do not engage in their own programming, but ask foreign governments to send (and pay for) productions of their choice which they then feature and host without a fee. This minimalism leads to incoherent artistic results but at least in Cairo censorship takes a step back and allows for an evening or two some foreign productions that it would never permit outside the festival setting. Hence an enormous public interest for things foreign that are just not available at any other time. After the end of the civil war in Lebanon, some rich hoteliers stimulated the renewal of dance and music festivals, in order to re-build quality tourism and appeal to Western visitors. (Johnson 2004). The new hostilities with Israel in the summer of 2006 and the ensuing instability have frustrated these efforts, yet another Baalbek International festival was announced with an impressive array of local and international sponsors for the summer of 2007. In contrast, the Theatre of the Oppressed Season under the title ‘Building Bridges… Breaking Barriers’, which took place in seven Palestinian cities in April 2007, was a mini-festival with Palestinian, German, Spanish and Brazilian companies, made possible by NGO support. It generated no economic impact but had great cultural and political significance, displaying the other face of globalization: the acceleration and intensification of exemplary gestures of solidarity with isolated and oppressed communities.
The logic of prestige
Since the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games a rich cultural program has become a standard feature of the Games, as an artistic festival that runs parallel with the sports events. There is little evidence that fans of the sports disciplines favor particular artistic forms but these Olympic festivals are being conceived in the logic of prestige and programmatic overkill, not as part of a marketing strategy. The businessmen who stood behind the Los Angeles Olympics were quick to cancel chunks of the cultural program when the threat of an overall deficit loomed. Nevertheless, they encouraged other cities hosting the Olympics to stretch their cultural ambitions and set the precedent for the subsequent Peter Sellars’ festival adventures (1990-93), celebrating the link between the cultures of the Pacific rim and their diasporic communities in the Los Angeles area. Coming after a few short lived international performing arts festivals in Baltimore and Denver, the Los Angeles event succeeded in lowering the prejudice against foreign language performances in the US and created a climate of curiosity that enabled subsequent international festivals in New York, such as the New Wave in the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Lincoln Center Summer Festival, to take off and bring in the foremost contemporary artists and their work.
These large events are run on modest local public subsidies and a great deal of sponsorship and private donations but would not be possible at all without the subsidies of the foreign governments that support their artistic ensembles as representatives of the national culture. Because access to the prestigious New York City venues appeared to be crowded and expensive, the Dutch government subsidized in 2007 an entire summer festival called ‘NL: a Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires’, stretched over the hills of Western Massachusetts, between the Tanglewood music festival and the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival, on the assumption that part of the New York cultural elite spends its vacation in the area. The rationale is not just the affirmation of national prestige via culture but is also based on the expectation that this condensed package will create more demand for Dutch arts in the US that will one day be satisfied on more commercial terms and with less need for government support. An illusion, for sure, because the cash-strapped US presenters continue to pay low fees. Yet those working in New York and a few other US cities profit, together with their Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai and Sao Paolo counterparts, from their prestige status: they are where everyone wants to be, the artists and especially the prestige- hungry governments.
The same prestige obsession, focused locally rather than abroad, has kept alive the European Cultural Capital scheme, initiated by the European Union and premiered in Athens in 1985. Since then, every year one, later two or three cities (but nine in 2000!) are allowed to carry the label and to organize a year long mega-festival. The EU contribution of roughly 1.5 per cent of the total budget on average pales into insignificance against the huge investment of the national, regional and local authorities (around 80 per cent), modest earned income and sponsorship in varying amounts. Since Glasgow (1990), this label has been seen as an opportunity for major infrastructural investment (sometimes completed after the end of the festive year!) and consequently the budgets keep rising. In the northern French city of Lille, for example, in 2004, the budget was € 74 million. Frequently the promised economic benefits and the expected masses of visitors do not materialize and the slight increase in external expenditure and hotel nights ebbs away in a year or two, while the local audiences quickly tire of the avalanche of international programming (Palmer 2004). Whatever image making hocus pocus is attempted, city reputations do not get essentially altered with just one year of heightened cultural life. Paris, Florence, Amsterdam, Prague, Barcelona or even small Weimar retain all the cultural references they had before obtaining the label, while cultural backwaters such as Luxemburg, Patras or Sibiu do not become transformed into favorite visitor destinations or into influential laboratories of cultural production.
Mainstream limitations and alternative responses
The proliferation of artistic festivals adds to the ongoing commodification of artistic works as cultural goods, offered in large programmatic packages, made to create an impression of plenty, diversity and richness, as a seductive bazaar or emporium of artistic creativity and talent, where lesser known names can piggyback the allure of the famous. Regardless of their artistic discipline or the multi/interdisciplinary character of their programming, international artistic festivals embody the art of packaging in the first instance, the mastery of bricolage, of composition and fusion in how their programs are put together (de Wend Fenton et al 2005). Most festival programmers have insufficient travel budgets, so they are forced to program not on the basis of broad insight into new artistic production and their own first-hand experience but more on rumor, gossip and opportunity – in other words according to whether some authority such as a ministry, a government agency, British Council or a Goethe Institute, or a conveniently identified sponsor, is willing to pay for a particular company:
In the dense logistic of the artistic festivals, companies and artists move in and out of town or appear at various locations during the same evening, competing for the attention of both spectators and the media, often hardly distinguishable one from the other while they take each other’s place. Equally, they are all quite decontextualized from their own original creative circumstances, made dependent on the marketing slang of the festival brochures and framed as exclusive goods that can be consumed only in the limited time allowed by the rhythm of the festival program (Sabate 2004).
In the performing arts, some experts claim to be able to recognize productions specifically made to appear on the festival circuit, in accordance with prevailing fashions and fads – such works are usually made to be quite easy, communicative, appealing, visually rich and less dependent on the spoken language in order to reduce the hassle of translation. At the same time, surtitling has facilitated the touring of language-based productions from one festival to another. Successful theater productions appear sometimes at a dozen festivals within a year or two, provoking complaints by critics that all festivals increasingly resemble each other. They forget, however, that festival audiences are much less mobile than theater professionals and critics.
In the world of feature film festivals, where commercial interests prevail, the presence of stars and their glamour serve to sustain media attention and engineer success, so as to facilitate background business transactions and the packaging of new film co-productions. In the consensual hierarchy of film festivals, their prizes have a specific commercial impact, with Venice and Cannes in the forefront, and Moscow, Toronto, Rotterdam and Chicago following closely behind.
Classical music festivals focus on the rather coherent and static music repertory of the last 200 years, but also on a tacit hierarchy of artists, ensembles and orchestras, derived from a limited set of references: who trained with whom, won which prizes, worked with which conductor or director, appeared on which opera stage or concert hall. These career markers determine the prestige of artists and of the festivals that program them and are also reflected in the appropriate fee scale, sometimes also in the range of ticket prices.
In contrast to those habitually subsidized events, commercial rock and pop music festivals nestle within specific music idioms and seek to capitalize on the groups and musicians who provide clear brand recognition, supported by an extensive line of merchandising. The growing popularity of ‘world music’ as a heterogeneous genre has enabled some festivals to shift gradually from non-profit to for-profit logic, with a steep rise in audience numbers that enables more programming. This inevitably turns previously obscure music phenomena and their practitioners, once marketed for their exoticism and supposed authenticity, into stars capable of setting global fashions and covering festival costs without public subsidy.
And yet, there are also festival niches that resist commodification, privilege surprise and excitement over perfect logistics and deliberately seek marginality or liminality against media overexposure. Those are small, usually short festivals in remote and not easily accessible locations, in the post-industrial debris of abandoned factories, in slums or in rural areas. These self-styled and self-propelled alternatives shun public support and sponsorship, stage unexpected performances in a zone of temporary autonomy, make underground creativity visible briefly for a relatively small audience of cognoscenti and fellow travelers, alerted via internet sites and SMS messages. The interest of the audience is to attempt to step out of globalization into something very local, very specific and of short duration but meaningful in terms of extraordinary experience, unavailable elsewhere. Even when they feature international artists, such festivals remain deliberately local in their context and impact, creating a cultural opposition to the more globalized spaces of cultural consumption, set in the centers of prestige and public attention.
While official artistic festivals abound in China, endowed with public subsidies of regional and municipal authorities, eager to jump on the globalization bandwagon and propelled by an increased willingness of corporations to sponsor them, small unofficial festivals, lasting only 2-3 days, pop up in Beijing and Shanghai, on the urban margins, without any visible support, in unconventional and obscure places, offering a sense of adventure to the participating artists, both Chinese and foreign, and small audiences. These occasional events avoid the official scrutiny of cultural programming by the authorities and at the same time counter the growing commercial orientation of both public and private cultural organizations. They leave hardly any traces, stay out of media attention and guard the anonymity of their teams. (Klaic 2007)
Unstable sponsors and under-explored recycling
International artistic festival differ much in their operating budget, degree of public subsidy vs. own income, duration, number of program features and audience volume. Some are autonomous non-profit organizations, others are spin offs of permanent cultural institutions that once a year at least aim to produce something different, special and eminently international. Increasingly, municipalities are setting up specialized agencies to invent and run f festivals of different format and type on a consistently professional level of production, communication and marketing (Silvanto 2007).
Those international festivals that have an evident artistic core and primary artistic purpose -- in contrast to commercial crowd-gathering events and community celebrations, where artistic work might have a mere decorative and entertainment function – almost inevitably depend on public subsidy to safeguard and advance their artistic ambitions. Even artistic festivals operating in the non-profit logic experience shifts in their economy as they seek to compensate shrinking subsidies with sponsorship and more earned income. Sponsorship deals tend to be short-lasting and in some instances unstable relations with sponsors imperil continuity. Big world brands appear as common festival sponsors, but tend to be led by the logic of local market opportunities. The competition of corporations for chief sponsor’s role is rare: the famous rivalry of Sbirbank and Nestle for the sponsorship of the Golden Mask festival, won by the former while the latter accepted the role of a secondary sponsor, remains an exception, explainable by specific Moscow circumstances, of a big, hot consumer market with too few prominent large-scale festivals that are suitable for sponsorship. Everywhere, sponsorship is a conceivable options for festivals that are big, have considerable exposure and audience volume and are consequently rather mainstream, if not conventional or elitist in their artistic program. The best strategy of smaller festivals is to turn their business associates and regular providers of goods and services into sponsors in kind, e.g. printers, accountants, lawyers, travel agencies, taxi companies, cafés and caterers… In countries where the government occasionally funds but regularly controls cultural productions, festivals that do not receive government subsidy cannot expect to find a sponsor either, while the awarding of government subsidy makes them in principle safe for sponsors, as in Singapore, where the National Art Council appears as the festival organizer, production subsidy distributor, censor and landlord.
As periodically reoccurring events, festivals find it difficult to sustain client loyalty from one edition to another but most of them still do not use the internet sufficiently as a platform on which to build a virtual community of hardcore fans and offer them a steady flow of information, services and products to create loyalty. In big cities with rich cultural offerings, most festival goers see only one or two program features – despite festival marketing that seeks to convey the entire program as something exceptional and unique. This signals that festivals are competing with all other culture producers for the limited attention of the public, itself overwhelmed with constantly increased cultural consumption options.
In the performing arts, including music, festivals increasingly appear as producers and not only as presenters. They pool resources and share risks with other producers, festivals and venues in order to make available new artistic work that could hardly be conceivable in the regular production of the theaters, operas and music halls, leading to surprising combinations of artistic talent and requiring budgets that no producer could provide alone. Such co-productions guarantee a longer series of performances and sufficient exposure for a secondary circuit of programmers to consider programming the production at some later time.
Festivals thus create and not only distribute cultural capital. Yet they do not pursue existing and emerging technological opportunities sufficiently to recycle it through digital platforms and reach a secondary audience in protracted time and expanded space. They underestimate the economic ‘window of opportunity’ made available by globalization and ICT revolution, as well as the chance to further legitimize public subsidies through digital educational applications derived from the live festival program. Only in the UK does the formulation of educational and outreach programs appear as a mandatory precondition for the granting of public subsidies. One might expect that with increased competition for subsidies elsewhere, those cultural operators who offer additional educational benefit from their cultural and artistic programming would be more likely to be recipients of public funds. Festivals are always chiefly local endeavors in their cultural, economic and social impact, but digital recycling offers them a chance to achieve a global presence as co-producers and distributors.
Local partnerships and alliances bring sustainability
Despite international programming and globalized reputations, festivals remain quite dependent on local circumstances – audience reception, political support, media coverage and loyalty or hostility of local artistic communities. Increased competition among cities underlines competition among festivals -- for prestige, prominent artists, media attention, sponsors and visitors. Locally, it seems that festivals able to forge a wide range of partnerships with domestic stakeholders tend to prosper and in some cases enhance the collaborative attitudes of cultural and educational organizations, the media, businesses and NGOs, thus becoming key contributors to local development. However, this prominent exposure exposes them to the imperative of permanent growth and forces them to prove that they can produce more programs, reach more audiences, secure more sponsorship and generate more minutes of electronic media attention. This unlimited growth is, however, unsustainable and even well-positioned festivals, with many associations and partnerships, could find themselves under the pressure of escalating and mutually incompatible expectations that ultimately engender frustration, disappointment and opposition.
It is conceivable that international artistic festivals will get caught in the cross fire between forces of globalization that seek to mainstream them and make them conform to successful formulae and commercial events, and defenders of the specifically local, and that they will in the process frustrate the expectations of both, thus provoking two-sided hostility. Local cultural elites and artistic communities may perceive a home festival as the importer of dangerous, subversive, contaminating cultural goods and as a peddler of effete foreign ware. At the same time, festivals might be reproached for not doing enough to appreciate, elevate and promote local creative talents and impulses internationally.
Older, established and prestigious festivals have discovered that prestige alone cannot ensure their vitality or guarantee the continuity of high public funding they used to take for granted. Neither can accumulated prestige hide fatigue and routine that undermine their credibility among audiences, always eager to experience something new and different. Fellow professionals, peers and colleagues appear as the most dangerous critics and their impatience with the ‘business as usual’ attitude could become quite dangerous (Hansen 2004).
Festivals of classical music appear to be increasingly disoriented by rapidly graying audiences, the collapse of the recording industry and the flight of traditional sponsors. Taken together these factors seriously endanger their financial equilibrium, made worse by rising costs, especially in the form of hefty fees for leading artists. It is increasingly difficult to find programming distinction within the constraints of a fairly narrow classical music repertory, whose core is made up of European music composed between 1750 and 1950. Paradoxically, thanks to digital copying and high capacity carriers, more people listen to more music than ever before, but festivals of classical music are finding it quite difficult to turn this situation to their advantage (Négrier 2006)..
That a top of the range MP3 player can contain today the programs of all classical music festivals held in the course of a single summer means that an average listener can with little effort and minimal cost function as his own programmer and secure a broader range of music than any single festival. This should be seen as an alerting signal and prompt programming innovation and genre mixture in order to make festivals profit from the eclectic music taste of the baby boomers, who remain loyal to their formative rock music experiences even as they turn into senior citizens – but invest their cosmopolitanism in the exploration of world music, while their preferences within the classical music repertory remain undifferentiated or, on the contrary, focused on some specific niche. Festivals that stubbornly perpetuate a classic repertory without experimentation, surprising mixtures and commissioning of new music might end up as the big losers, despite their reputation and tradition. Small classical music festivals, driven by the passion and enthusiasm of a circle of music lovers and developed throughout the summer in unusual settings, such as small village churches in popular vacation regions of France, show growth and good interactions with the local tourist industry.
Many festivals thrive in a clearly defined programming niche and derive their strength from a coherent concept and context, from a local loyalty of volunteers and collaborating partners, from programming that is consistent yet offers participative opportunities. Festivals that phrase their artistic program in terms of a social agenda, referring to gender, migration, exclusion, marginality, and festivals that explore their urban context, making the urbanity both the topic and the context, seem to be successful as well as festivals of new media that test the audience’s habits and preferences and challenge it with new capabilities and modes of interactivity.
Those festivals that have avoided being labeled a tacit ally of the forces of globalization but instead bring globalization into their programming philosophy, not as a fatality but as a phenomenon that provokes the articulation of a critical discourse, are as a rule doing well and finding partners and allies, locally and internationally. While some festivals complain of rising costs, not matched adequately by public subsidies, sponsorship and ticket sales, in some parts of the world successful festivals are still being put together on a shoestring budget, with much free work and donated services and goods and very little cash expenditure, but with international artists participating without a fee, out of a sense of adventure or solidarity.
The need for festival policies
The rapidly growing number of festivals, often in the same place, creates dilemmas for the pubic authorities: which ones to support, why and with how much? Public authorities need therefore to articulate a firm festival policy with precise objectives, goals, funding criteria and monitoring and evaluation procedures. Otherwise, they will continue to dwell in the prevailing practice of incidental and arbitrary decisions, serving steady and re-occurring clients, rich in tradition and prestige, and shortchanging new, disgruntled applicants who promise more results for less money. Very few cities, regions and national ministries for culture or funding agencies have attempted to develop such policies; private foundations, often instrumental in festival funding, have not done so either.
On the international level, there is not much policy-making that could be suggested or expected, especially as national governments jealously consider culture as their exclusive realm of competence. UNESCO, the Asia-Europe Foundation and the Anna Lindh Foundation for Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation, inter alia, could develop ways to support festivals not so much for their expected economic benefits (because they will in most cases not be achieved) but primarily as instruments of artistic, cultural and social development, inclusion through new audience development and innovation in cultural practices. They may decide to support festivals that can develop the spirit of partnership and broad local alliance-building and enhance the intercultural competencies of both cultural operators and audiences. The European Union has recognized the value of artistic mobility and made possible in its culture program more international co-productions with the participation of different festivals, but frustrates the growing ambitions and productive ingenuity of cultural operators by its miniscule budget and heavy-handed administrative requirements.
Conclusions
Artistic festivals remain chiefly a local affair -- despite the international component in their programming, success or failure depends on local entrepeneurship, the capability to engage various local constituencies and the capacity to turn the dialectic of the global and local to their advantage rather than against it The impacts are also chiefly local and lie predominantly in the artistic, cultural and social sphere, not in the generation of economic benefit, as is often assumed. Direct economic impact is a privilege of very few festivals whose programming formula and public appeal are reinforced by an advantageous location, a certain festival mythology and ample public subsidies.
Hosting many foreign artists in a condensed programming frame benefits local artists and audiences and offers opportunities to innovate as regards cultural practices, expand the audience base and create new partnerships among local players. Public authorities that support artists and artistic ensembles to travel to foreign festivals are mainly driven by prestige considerations but in fact they support the development of artistic excellence through mobility and ultimately local audiences as well.
Artistic festivals function in a context determined by globalized economic pressures that impose a uniformization of artistic practices and the commodification of the cultural goods created and featured. Due to the increased competition of consumer options within limited leisure time, any cluster of events now often calls itself a festival in order to convey some exceptional significance. This is often an isolated marketing gimmick rather than a sustained and consistent programming strategy. Yet artistic festivals can respond productively to such pressures: by the flexible modification of programming formulae, or the inclusion of social issues, through international co-productions and the digital recycling of cultural capital, by forging solid local alliances. They can also turn globalization itself into the subject of festival narratives and critical discourse.
Retrenching public authorities see private sponsorship as a panacea for shrinking pubic subsides instead of developing consistent festival funding policies. But festivals will depend increasingly on local subsides and support bases which they can reinforce through their international reputation and prestige. On the international scale, major festivals will probably form consortia to produce exceptional high-budget works, ensure their proper exposure and prolonged exploitation through digital spin offs, thus reinforcing their own dominant position in the dense festival jungle.
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NB. The European Festival Research Project (EFRP), an international consortium, makes festival research outcomes publicly accessible on the website of the European Festival Association: http://www.efa-aef.org/efahome/efrp.cfm