And as countless festival organizers and chambers of commerce have realized, the longer visitors stay, the more they spend. As the summer season draws to a close, communities across the world—from outsize cities to modest villages—are counting the rewards of tapping into this booming cultural economy. This year Europe alone will stage some 400 arts festivals, ranging from the Reykjavik Jazz Festival to the Edinburgh International Festival of music, opera and theater, which last month celebrated its 60th anniversary.
All the world loves a party, it seems—especially one that pays its own way. “More and more places are recognizing the massive economic, cultural and social benefits of a festival,” says Joanna Baker, the Edinburgh festival’s marketing director. To be sure, a successful arts festival represents a happy union of commercial self-interest and public entertainment. Though many of even the best-known festivals need public subsidies to survive, they still provide an opportunity to lift a community’s profile or pack its restaurants and hotels. A U.S. report two years ago found that the nation’s various arts festivals generated an extra $103.1 billion for local businesses. Small wonder that city fathers are often happy to play sponsor; a full 25 percent of the $16 million budget for Manchester’s new international arts came from the local authorities. “It’s simple,” says Frédéric Vincent of the Culture Directorate at the European Commission in Brussels. “Festivals bring in money and tourism.” And not just ordinary tourists, but big-spending well-behaved ones.
Festivalgoers face an increasingly eclectic array of subjects—and venues. Barcelona, for one, boasts 26 major arts festivals a year (including jazz, electronic media and erotic cinema)—only one more than Melbourne, Australia. Film buffs can now choose between showings in cities from Aarhus in Denmark to Zagreb, not to mention the Pan-African Festival of Film and Television in Burkina Faso. Abu Dhabi is building a vast park on an island in the gulf as a home for its own biennial arts festival. And with help from the state tourist board and some big-name performers, the annual Singapore Arts Festival pulled in more than 700,000 visitors this year.
Ambitious promoters are now looking across borders to push successful formulas. In recent years, the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Britain (dubbed the “Woodstock of the mind” by former U.S. president Bill Clinton) has established similar events in Segovia, Spain, and the Colombian city of Cartagena. Even newcomers to the market have little problem filling seats; Manchester reports packed houses and reckons it’s on target to attract 300,000 visitors within a few years.
To the optimists, those surging numbers suggest a welcome change in public tastes. The new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has spoken of the proliferating literary festivals—Britain now has more than 300, compared with just three back in 1983—as evidence of a new cultural “seriousness.” Others believe the communal experience of festivalgoing provides a useful antidote to the solitary pastimes—many of them electronic—of 21st-century life. “Our modern cities need these events,” says Don Getz, professor of tourism at the University of Calgary in Canada, who’s studied the festival boom. “We are without community or roots and we define ourselves more and more by the events that we go to.”
But festival frenzy can be too much of a good thing. A report published last year for the Edinburgh International Festival warned that the rising tally of festivals would rapidly increase the competition for audiences. The workaday port of Rotterdam is now home to a year-round series of festivals (jazz, poetry, film, architecture) in part to keep up with its classier neighbor, Amsterdam. In an age of cheap air travel, the opera lover with a free weekend can head for Riga as easily as Salzburg.
And there’s a finite supply of sponsors and public money, not to mention performers. Already there’s grumbling over rising fees for the biggest names. “If you have any ambitions to be a world-leader festival you are going to face competition,” says Hugo de Greef of the European Festivals Association in Brussels. “Not every artist can be available for every festival.”
Critics argue that the whole purpose of the festival is changing. “Festivals used to belong to the public,” says Getz. “Now they are almost always created for strategic reasons.” Inevitably, that brings the risk of losing distinctive appeal. “This ‘festivalization’ is creating a kind of homogeneity problem that festivals were created to solve,” said Janice Price, boss of Luminato, Toronto’s Festival of Arts and Creativity.
Still, the benefits are simply too good to pass up. Cultural festivals are emerging as the new must-have for postindustrial cities keen to recast their images. Redeveloping the rundown waterfront or calling in big-name architects is only the start. “Big, flashy iconic buildings are not enough,” says Fran Thoms, head of Cultural Strategy at Manchester City Council in Britain. “You need to fill the space between the buildings—and that’s where festivals come in.”
If all else fails, cities can follow the example of little Leavenworth, Washington, and completely re-create themselves as a festival center. When Leavenworth’s logging industry collapsed, the settlement was remodeled to resemble a Bavarian village capable of hosting a range of cultural events. Result: 2 and a half million visitors a year. And a reputation as a don’t-miss stop on the festival circuit.
