I’ve woken up many times in my life, and by all accounts I plan to keep said honoured tradition going for a while yet. But never have I had quite such an experience doing so as the time I awoke face down in a straw trilby hat inside a tent deep in the heart of Berkshire, dislodged my elbow from a crushed beer can and turned to hear the sounds of a man outside my tent quoting The Lord of the Rings at the top of his voice. That was the second day of Reading Festival 2011, it was my second ever music festival, the first being a small local affair called 2000 Trees back in Gloucestershire. From that day I developed a small obsession with festivals, it was so much more and so much better than any summer lads’ holiday could ever be, I surmised.
In Britain, the summer festival is something of an obsession amongst a significant portion of the population. Only a country such as ours could garner such enjoyment out of spending a weekend in a country field, reduced by the end into a ravaged bog perhaps surpassed only by Paschendale in 1917.The British festival experience is a battle against alcohol, the elements and all reasonable expectations of personal hygiene.
But where does the festival go from here? The big games in town such as Festival Republic and Virgin (because Virgin are a big game in every town, obviously) have consistently reported a decline in ticket sales in recent years, and are struggling to turn a profit. The increased costs of hiring big name acts is attributed as one of the economic causes of the problem: the cost of hiring Jay-Z to perform at Glastonbury 2008 nearly bankrupted the festival. But many of those involved in the industry feel there are other factors at play, namely as Glastonbury organizer Michael Eavis has articulated, people have just “seen it all before”.
In my own case, my interest in festivals has certainly dipped of late; I have no present plans to attend one this year. Perhaps I, at the grand old age of 19, have already reached a kind of jaded, home comforts mentality normally found in men in their 70s, and find myself too world weary to spend four days unwashed in a field. But it seems like there might be a trend emerging from those who don’t place the same stock as I in a hot bath.
The situation looked as if it had reached a critical point last year, with the 2012 Olympics taking a huge toll on the festival industry, with many of the big names such as Glastonbury and The Big Chill announcing early that their festivals would be taking a year off. Others such as Sonisphere attempted to carry on, but were forced to cancel after poor ticket sales. In the case of Sonisphere it was rumoured that the festival was only able to sell 10,000 out of the possible 80,000 tickets available, leading some, such as Eavis, to question whether the festival bubble had burst.
James McMahon, editor of Kerrang said of the issue: “There’s too many festivals full stop and, with the recession, I think everyone has money worries”. McMahon also feels that big names in music, particularly rock are no longer the sellout powerhouses they once were in the heydays of AC/DC and Nirvana. Many festivals are attempting to attract a different, less traditional crowd of festival goers with a new breed of act from other genres or with big names of yesteryear, appealing to the nostalgia element. The rise of less festival orientated music like Dubstep and House in recent years can also be partially attributed, with even big chart toppers from pop and RnB no longer bringing in such a broad base of punter as they did when Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury back in 2008.
However, as the large, more established festivals hit hard times, many smaller, independent festivals have been performing staggeringly well, such as the rapidly growing Bestival, the pet project of DJ and record producer Rob Da Bank, whose fiefdom now stretches to other independent festivals such as Camp Bestival. Bestival is joined by other small festivals that have seen a dramatic increase in popularity over the last few years such as Secret Garden Party and End of the Road. Is the indie festival the future of festivals? Rob Da Bank certainly seems to think so. He built his independent festival empire on an ethos of “love over glory” and feels this is the factor that allows it to endure against his more corporate competitors.
Da Bank and many other Indie festival curators feel that the festival has lost touch with its roots. It may not quite be the 1960s anymore, but the feeling among st the indie festival crowd is that the idea and spirit behind festivals should still be, as the website of 2000 Trees festival eloquently put it “An Organic Labour of Love”. A little hard to quantify perhaps, but the core sentiment is clear. The festival was in many ways the last great bastion of communitarian, hippy free spirits from the ever encroaching JCB of consumerism and corporatisation. Now even festivals have become a business, a thing which some believe is the antithesis of everything a festival was supposed to represent, because I mean, like, they have them in fields.
Now obviously the fact that people who run small, alternative music festivals are just a tiny bit pseudo-Marxist in their outlook is clearly earth shattering news. But it’s not just them who seem to feel this way, indeed it’s not just constrained to music. In recent years every time the Cannes Film Festival and Edinburgh Festival roll around we hear similar complaints, and from a variety of different voices. Is this a sign of something greater? Have we reached the moment that many independent, arty critics of big business and its influence in the arts have being prophesying since time immemorial? Is capitalism, for want of a better word, destroying the arts?
As early back as 2008 there was an article in The Independent accusing Cannes of being in severe decline. The piece pointed to the festival of 1996, where the part for the release of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting erupted into widespread hedonism even by the standards of the film community.
The film and its cast took the festival by storm and Cannes erupted into Trainspotting fever. Flash forward to 2006 when the Da Vinci Code was largely panned by critics, but to little avail. The huge levels of money and marketing behind it meant the film essentially overtook the festival in a coup, with the poor reviews of the day becoming a distant memory. And so the film still opened to huge crowds at the box office. For this reason, along with the perceived snubbing of smaller, less commercially viable projects which later went on to be huge successes, it becomes clear: Cannes has a seemingly schizophrenic inability to decide whether it is about an appreciation of art or commerce.
Its quite clear that Cannes represents, much like music festivals, the ever-growing primacy of the business and commercial aspect over the artistic element, finally taking the fight to their last bastion of highbrow, artistic solitude. It seems that critical reception is now no longer relevant, with the opinions of the late Roger Ebert and his ilk, so learned in the art, not having the faintest impact on box office sales and thus, not providing the incentive to stop the studios making them, or festivals from promoting them. Ultimately it would appear that the cinema-goers themselves have completely lost interest in the views of the experts, which whilst on the one hand has something of a ring of a populist victory, but on the other, was exactly what gave us those last couple of Transformers movies.
Admittedly, we are only taking into account summer blockbusters, which are almost categorically reviled by critics, loved by teenage boys, and year in, year out hailed as the fourth horseman of the nonexistent cinematic apocalypse. Outside of this, cinema remains just as strong as it ever was, despite independent films by their very nature never receiving the attention that big studios should give them. The real losers of this struggle between selling tickers and making art have been mid-sized projects, or risky bets for studios. But No Country for Old Men and its like were huge successes without the help of Cannes, winning a considerable amount of respect in the process from the ever growing crowd, who do tire of the culture of endless sequels.
In the end, the solution to this problem is simple bravery on the part of the studios, a willingness to take on a gutsy project in the lieu of yet another Shrek film. What part Cannes will play in this in the future, however, seems to be dependent on whether another Da Vinci Code can wriggle itself into the festival.
Edinburgh Fringe, this year taking place from 2-26 August, is the biggest arts festival in the world and goes to some lengths to prove that the Dan Brown effect that seems to crop up at Cannes from time to time isn’t necessarily the direction festivals have to take. Combining over 24,000 performers in nearly 3,000 shows, Fringe has something planned for any lover of the arts and is in itself something of a microcosm for the entire arts world. For three weeks, the historic Scottish city becomes an eclectic collection of comedians, musicians, and actors. There’s so much going on at any given moment that no one can hope to see even a fraction of what the festival has to offer. It’s a bubble of sheer creativity and talent.
Of course, just like any other big festival, there are high-profile acts that get mentioned whenever Fringe is brought up. These acts bring in people and sell tickets like hotcakes because, let’s face it, those running the festival do need to make it a commercial success. But at Fringe there’s so much more. I skimmed through the festival’s official programme, and I was astounded by its ludicrous size. The list of comedy acts alone took up pages 36 to 169, and that was just one category. Theatre took 90 pages to cover, and music took another 40. The amount of events and performances, corporately-backed or otherwise, is staggering and gives us hope that we aren’t doomed to a complete industrialization of the arts.
Something of that scope does naturally bring its own share of problems, though. Does anyone actually think that every comedian on that exhaustive list of acts is funny? Obviously not. But in some ways, isn’t that the point? Every artistic field is subjective, appealing to different audiences and consisting of both the Kubricks and the Shyamalans of the world. It’s our job as casual fans or obsessive connoisseurs to find what works for us, what inspires and moves us. If we have to be spoon-fed what’s considered good and what isn’t, we’ll end up in a world of shoddy festivals that seem to follow the same pattern every single year, with acts that by now have given up any pretense of artistic integrity.
But if we’re given an experience that can encompass both the commercial and the niche, a festival that celebrates every variety of creativity and expression and which mirrors the undeniable scope of what we can define as ‘art’, maybe we don’t have to be cynical about the future of festivals. When one city puts its everyday life on hold for a month so that performers and the public can come together for artistic appreciation, we witness something beautiful. Sure, there are corporate sponsors, indeed they are an inescapable fact of life, but that means very little in the long run.
Ultimately it’s worth wagering that the arts will endure. Like all things of an intrinsically subjective nature, it takes a specialized eye to realize something extraordinary, and although at times those specialized eyes no longer seem to be the ones who make the calls, they will band together in their bolt holes and continue to fight their cause. In recent years arts for the connoisseur has become what it always was in the traditions of painting and sculpture: niche and exclusive. But, for those who enjoy and appreciate it, what’s there not to like about only sharing your clubhouse with your fellow enthusiasts, people who can appreciate creative expression for its artistic value?
Festivals might be going for the lowest common denominator, trying to attract the widest possible audience while hemorrhaging money faster than I did last week in Evil Eye, but that’s not the whole story. Smaller or more inclusive events exist to prove that regardless of how far Dan Brown will go to churn out his style of half-digested verbal diarrhea, art is no closer to dying. There’s something out there for everyone; we just have to remember there are options other than Glastonbury.