Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 28

Yet festivals must also, in order to attain prominence and support, speak
the language of the arts orthodoxy: pay or somehow reward workers; adhere
to laws; communicate via existing channels; operate within externally
determined systems of value and celebrity and appropriateness. You would
be hard-pressed to find a festival director who hasn’t found, soon into taking
the job or establishing the event, that while ideas about change, innovation,
and discovery go down well in interviews and are invited on funding
applications, the reality of change can prove less appealing to sponsors,
stakeholders, and boards who are firmly invested in the status quo. It’s a
little bit like being a politician or a president who runs on a platform of
revolutionary change only to find that once in the door the system has an
already powerful investment in maintaining the status quo.
These gaps have arguably become all the more contested in recent times,
with the rise of a political mindset that casts doubt on the authority of
experts and gatekeepers. One has never had to look far to find vociferous
criticism of elites who presume to tell ordinary people what’s culturally good
for them, but the age of the internet, and particularly of social media as an
opinion-former and news source, has amplified it to sometimes deafening
levels. Festival programming never happened in a vacuum, but there’s now
an increased awareness that risky programming can very quickly bring
petitions, boycotts, sponsor withdrawals, and existential threats in its wake.
Whether we regard this as fair accountability—democracy in action—or a
new brand of mob rule, the megaphone that is social media ensures that
cultural insiders and outsiders are no longer as separate as they might once
have been.
For many, festivals represent a suspension of routine and of normal priorities.
People who attend them or work for them usually believe passionately that
these events offer some sort of better vision of what we can collectively be, not
only via the promotion of art, but also through the temporary presentation
of an alternative society. Anyone who’s been to a really vast festival—for me
it was Glastonbury in the early ����s, but there are so many now—may have
had that mad moment of thinking what if we just carried on living like this? And
yet, even an event like that can also be argued to perpetuate hierarchies and
social divides; it does what it does, rich people take part and then they move
on with excess arty energies discharged, often leaving a mess behind them.
There was a piece that ran in the London Review of Books in ���� about the
Burning Man festival, at which well-off Americans suspend normal existence
for a few days and experiment with every counter-culture freedom they can
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