Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism

Front matter

fee ae the a n of (anialism The Doare tly eg by Aur Vogel

BRILL | RODOPI

Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism

PART 1 Affordances

1.8

1.9 1.10 1.11

1.12

Festival Research in the Cinema Field 35

Propositions for Film Festivals 36

Historical Origins 37

Contemporary State-Festival Relationships 39 Within-Population Differentiation 39

Center/Periphery in the Cinema Field 41

Festivals as Counter-Culture and Sites for Identity-Politics 42 Film Festivals and Urban Interests: Place-Making and City Circuits 43

Festivals as an Attention-Economic Space and Temporal Order 44

The Film Festival as an Organizational Intermediary 45 Festival: Labor and Work 46

The Arts-Nonprofit Mission 48

Summary 49

Sociological Resonance 49

2.1 2.2

2.3

2.4

Experience-Making and Valuation Sociology 49 Experience-Making and Urban Sociology of the Creative

City 50

Globalization Studies and Cultural Economization/Economic Culturalization 50

Integrating the Insights: Sociology of Art and Culture 51

From Artistic to Social Critique for Art Production’s Sake 53

VI

CONTENTS

3 4

Of Norm and Desire: The Ideal of Creativity 58

11 Aestheticization 60

1.2 Surprise Value in the Postmodern Art Field 65 Unassuming Positivity and Affective Governmentality 68 21 Field Boundaries and the Role of Formats 70

2.2 Postmodern Experience-Making and the Arranger 73 Festivalization of Media, Urban and Market Spheres 75 Festivalization and the AEMR Model 76

Cinema Format and the Curation of ‘Affective Spaces’ 80

11 Assumptions about Festival Format: Towards Analysis of Affective Spaces 81

12 Empirical Material 84

The Classical Format 85

Palace, Theatre, Mall Cinema and the Multiplex 89

Art Cinema as a Distinct Format 93

Clubs and Fests 96

The Arrival of the Festival Format 98

The Cultural Technique of Cinema 103

PART 2 Devices 1 2

3 4

Festival Events and Field Configuration 109

Collusion and Conviviality in Field-Configuring Events 113 Formats and Isomorphism 1g

Aestheticization and Rationalization—an Irresolvable Tension? 127

The Experience-Market Model and the Stabilization of Value 136

Regimes of Economic Coordination 140

2.1 The Mega Regime (Impersonal Device) 142

CONTENTS

VII

2.2 Authenticity Regime (Impersonal Device) 143

2.3 Expert-Opinion Regime (Impersonal Device) 145

2.4 Common-Opinion Regime (Impersonal Devices) 145

2.5 The Audiences of the Creativity Dispositif and Their Participation in Device Worlds 146

2.6 The Network-Market 149

Festival Film and Grant-Makers’ Devices 154

Nonprofit Actors in Value Chains? 155

Studying Device Power: The Festival Effect 159

11 Film Performance Study 160

1.2 Device Impact for Prestigious Film Festivals 161

Operationalization and Conjectures 162

21 Cr: Film Festival Participation Increases the Odds of a Movie Attaining Theatrical Revenue 163

2.2 C2: Film Festival Participation Increases the Odds of a ‘Deal’ for the Movie 164

2.3 C3: Film Festival Participation Increases the Odds of a Film Artist Making Future Movies 165

2.4 C4: Film Festival Participation Increases the Odds of a Film Artist Receiving Any Future Prizes 165

2.5 C5: Film Festival Participation Increases the Odds of Prizes Awarded toa Movie 166

Statistical Results 166

The Festival Effect 175

Limitations and Methodological Challenges to Device

Studies 179

PART 3 Justifications 1 2

3 4

Nonprofit Workforce and Labor Markets 188

Festival Workforce Patterns 190

Charismatic Capitalism 194

Commitment, Project Worker, and Creative Ethos 201

VIII

CONTENTS

5 Festival: Project Work in a Charismatic Pro-social Workplace 209 6 Concluding Discussion 21

Spreading the Risk: Film Festival Work and Creative Labor Strategies 215 1 Creative Labor and Precarity Research 216 2 Multiple Jobholding and Risk-Spreading 218 2.1 Multiple Jobholding Research 218 2.2 Observing Multiple Jobholding in Festival Workers 221 2.3 Spreading the Risk 222 2.4 DataandSample 224 2.5 Concepts and Measures 225 2.6 Findings and Interpretation 228 2.7 The Value of Unpaid FestivalJobs 231 3 Conclusion 234

1 Legal Boundary-Making of the Volunteer and the Question of Compensation 238 11 The Intern and the Volunteer in English and German

Law 238

12 Volunteering and the English Law 239 13 Volunteering andthe German Law 242 1.4 Internship in English and German Law 243

2 Volunteering as Policy Instrument and the Higher-Education Interest 245

3 The Experience Value of Unpaid Festival Work 250 ı Analytic Tools: Poleis, Critical Capacity, and Grand and Little Persons 258 Data and Methodological Approach 260 ‘Something Funny Happens When You Get Paid’ 261

CONTENTS IX

PART 4 Adjustments ı Affect and Rational Capitalism 281

2 Four Actor Models for ‘Affected’ Late-Modern Capitalism 284

3 Affective Order and the Impermanence Aestheticized Life Worlds 288

4 Event Power: On Charity and Justice 291

The Power of Persuasion, a Neglected Concept 294

Ol

A Postmodern Grants Economics: Elites, Excess, and Cultural Diversity 301 1 Culturalization and ‘L’Exception Culturelle 303 2 The ‘Economy of Love’: Culturalization and the ‘Benevolence State’ 3u 2.1. ‘There Is No Business Like Show Business’ 314 2.2 Film Festivals and Relation to Subsidization 318 3 Concluding Discussion 321

1 The National and International Arena of Philanthropy 327 Activation 331 Civic Polis, Positive Emotions, and the Disappearance of Equality 331 31 Civic Polis and the Justification Regime of Benevolence 337 3.2 Renaissance for Inclusion—and Cultural Diversity at the Loss

of Equality Ideals? 344 4 The Rise of the ‘Benevolence State’ 348

Conclusion of Part4 355 Toward Social Activism, a Conclusion 357 Appendix: Methodological Supplement for Chapter6 365

Bibliography 371 Index 414

Acknowledgments

This inquiry into the significance of individual and collective experiencing in late-modern capitalism is dedicated to my graduate school teachers at the University of Washington, who each with their extraordinary expertise have inspired me to explore their respective paths and who keep resonating in my thought and research processes as I am going my own path: Gary G. Hamilton, Howard S. Becker, and the late Herbert L. Costner.

The research for this book benefitted from grants and institutional support by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES 000-22-1056), British Academy (SG-41938), the University of Cambridge, the University of Exeter, and Singapore Management University (06-C208-sMU-o21). It started with Tain A. Lang as co-investigator on the ESRC-grant project and would have been less tactile and fun without him. I thank the diligent and enthusiastic research assistants who, between 2005 and 2011, helped with data collection, interview transcriptions, and survey data compilations. These are Jean Harrington, Amy Singer (Research Fellow), Simon Clode, Anthony Creaton, and Maren Klotz at Exeter University; and Edward Lim Junhao, Eleina Ailmchandani, Eileen Lee Yi Hui, Alvin Witirto, Shu Ting Wee, and Zen Goh Wan Chen at sMU. Legal scholar Katharina Möser will be remembered for bringing my attention to the legal aspects of volunteer recruiting on our visit to the Australian field sites. My former colleague, the late philosopher John N. Williams will be remembered for his fine translation of the English-German comparative law paper I wrote with Katharina. I thank Christian Boulanger for commenting on Chapter g; Steven Vallas for commenting on early research outputs pertaining to the sociology of work, and William N. (Bill) Kaghan and Wai-Keung Chung for commenting on Chapter 4.

For co-writing conference papers in the early stages and interdisciplinary dialogue on some of the major ideas that made it into this book, I thank the Cambridge economist Alan Shipman, who also read closely the full manuscript. Partial results were presented at various university conferences and academic workshops in Berlin, Chicago, Grenoble, Hong Kong, London, Lund, Montreal, New York, Seattle, Singapore, and Venice. For their contributions to these various conference papers, I thank Katharina Moser, Shu Ting Wee, Miodrag (Misha) Petrovic, and Iain Lang. I also thank Skadi Loist, now at Film University of Babelsberg, who since 2008 kept drawing me into the circles of the enthusiastic media scholars’ community whose works are ‘on stage’ in Chapter 1.

XII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All the people interviewed as research subjects will remain anonymous. I am very grateful for their sharing of time and thoughts with the interviewing team. For hosting me in their homes and adding their views to the fieldwork in-progress, I happily remember the Pippa & Bob Cotton family in Sydney, Christina Evertz in Tokyo, my brother's colleague Dave Ardell in Uppsala, Wang Shutong in Shanghai, Kim Korinek in Salt Lake City, and the always generous Don & Judy Horwitz family in Chicago and Park City.

I enjoyed the productive atmosphere emanating from working with BRILL, thanking Masja Horn for putting my manuscript under swiftly review, the anonymous reviewers for their enthusiastic support of the project, and Christa Stevens for her extremely efficient coordination at every stage. Having foraged research libraries for festival ephemera and literature over the course of many years, I will not forget the wonderful support by staff in libraries and collections, especially Ruth Pagell, former chief of staff at smu’s Li Kashing Library in Singapore, but many more, such as at the Berlin State Library at Unter den Linden where I had my own desk for a year, the Hong Kong Film Archive, UCLA Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles, and the inter-library loan section office at Leuphana University Liineburg.

Key informant dialogue on ‘the industry’ provided for some of the major ‘turning points’ in research strategy, allowing for the multi-perspectival approach of this book: I thank Jonathan Handel in Los Angeles, Gabrielle Kelly in New York and Singapore for sharing their insider views; Peter Tsi in Hong Kong for opening my eyes to the business models circulating in festivals; Alfred Cervantes in Houston for helping me understand film policy; and Kathryn Lenton for getting me through the maze of Sundance. I am grateful to my graduate-school peer Julie (Beth) Jackson for examining excruciatingly my statistical model results and sharing interpretations and draft-readings that lead to a robust first draft of what later became Chapter 6. The same goes for Singapore fellow sociologist Nicholas (Nick) Harrigan, who helped interconnecting the data correctly while also vetting my first conference-paper output. At SMU, I also benefited from having productive talks with my peers at the School of Social Sciences, such as Brian Mooney, Ivy Lau, Sandy Lim, Kirpal Singh, Clara Portela, Wai Keung Cheung, Eduard Jordaan, Luan Shenghua as well as the smu geographer Kam Tin Seong. Finally, I must acknowledge the influence of Hans-Peter Miiller at Humboldt University of Berlin on some of the theoretical explorations in this work, as his passion for European sociological theory was contagious.

Turning to friends and family, I want to express special gratitude to Frank Hoche whose persisting interest in precarious cultural work and current social politics engendered many exciting discussions; Benedikt von Ammon for all

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XIII his brilliant advice and passing on his brilliant humor; Modar Mhanna for insisting that I stay positive, and for providing security; Tezer Altınok for cooking generous meals, the basis of many enjoyable dinner conversations; and my mother, Sabine Vogel, for all her support during my repatriation.

Art is collective action. So is science. In this spirit, I am deeply grateful to Mohammed Hegazi in Kuala Lumpur for holding me accountable to my daily writing progress on the final stretch; and to Ayşe Lenz in Berlin for reminding me of the fine difference between endurance and persistence.

Figures and Tables

Figures

The global film festival population: historical emergence (a) and by world region (b), based on first event (Vogel, 2015) 23

Film festival characteristics (1932-2012) for the four world regions of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern America and Oceania (presented for Australia and New Zealand)—a. first events, b. closing events, and c. span of event activity in years (from left to right) (Vogel, 2015) 25

Film festival characteristics (1932-2012) for the four world regions of Asia—a. first events, b. closing events, and c. span of event activity in years (from left to right) (Vogel, 2015) 26

Film festival characteristics (1932-2012) for the four regions of Europe—a. first events, b. closing events, and c. span of event activity in years (from left to right) (Vogel, 2015) 27

Tables

Global film festival population, 1998-2013 (Follows, 2013) 20

Top locations across film festival history (Vogel, 2015) 22

Comparative magnitude and strength in cinema cultural patterns, expressed in Pearson’s r, based on author’s data and public records (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2009; Vogel, 2015) 28

The artistic and the social critique, based on (Boltanski & Chiapello,

Comparison of social forms pertaining to modern and late-modern art fields, based on (Reckwitz, 2014b, pp. 124-126) 62

Reckwitz’s typology of the social regimes of novelty, based on (Reckwitz, 2014b) 65

Karpik’s typology of frames of action for economic choices, derived from (Karpik, 2010, pp. 36-43) 136

Originality and personalization models, summarized from (Karpik, 2010) 141 Festival audiences according to De Valck (2005) 149

Characteristics of the 2006-movie sample by: movie genre, means, percentages and statistical significance (n= 299) 168

FIGURES AND TABLES XV

13 14 15 16

Logistic regression of commercial outcomes and negative binomial regression of artistic outcomes for movies and filmmakers participating in film festivals on festival circuit, film and artistic factors, and controls (n = 299) 170

Labor force patterns of film festivals (n = 140), 2005/2006 (Lang et al.,

2006) 192

Types of control found in DsOs (Biggart, 1989, pp. 134-159) 196

Sample characteristics for UK film festival workers, n = 50 (author’s data) 225 Typology of film festival workers’ career directedness (author’s measure) 227 Film festival workers’ multiple-jobholding pattern by individuals’ work history (n=50) 227

Festival worker's risk-spreading and self-realization tactics (based on author's data) 229

Australian and European festival workers’ understandings of benefits derived from volunteering, n = 69 (author's research) 251

The orders of worth (poleis), based on (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005b; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2007, p. 95) and (Denis et al., 2007) 259

Remuneration-worthy work and poleis according to Australian and European festival workers, n = 69 (author’s compilation) 263

Summary of data clusters presented in Table 20 264

Synthesis of recent actor concepts with Weber's action typology (Reckwitz, 2017b; Schulze, 1992; Weber, 1978) 287

Power of persuasion, based on Baumann’s typology (Baumann, 1993b), incorporating (Karpik, 2010, pp. 45-46) 296

If the economic impulse in itself is universal, it is an interesting question as to the relations under which it becomes rationalized and rationally tempered in such fashion as to produce rational institutions of the character of capitalistic enterprise.

General Economic History, MAX WEBER (1924)

Immersive environments such as arts theatres, festival curations, flagship stores, and amusement parks are an essential ingredient of ‘aesthetic capitalism’ (Böhme, 2017). With the rapid development of the twenty-first century's global digital economy (Böhme, 2017; Elder-Vass, 2016; Hamilton et al., 2011; Joyce & Navarro-Remesal, 2020; Staab, 2019; Tapscott, 2015; Zuboff, 2019), their spread and ‘atmospheric charge’ impacting human wants and routines remains still little noticed by social scientists beyond a minority of scholars (Böhme, 1993). The study of cinema provides a fertile ground for closing this gap. Paralleling the refinement of the immersive powers of the moving image, the immersive environment made its first appearance as aesthetic-industrial design to induce individual and collective experiences by Walt Disney (Chytry, 2012), but has disproportionately received attention by cinema industry analysts who focus on the medium of film. This book puts the immersive environment center stage, examining film festival organizations as one of its major producers and as to their role in the larger socioeconomic environment. In this analysis of cinema, late-modern capitalism, and the politics of culture I call them ‘experience-makers’ because their business is the curation of presentations that further film cultures as aesthetic and social endeavor, doing so within the setting of instituted screen culture, where art is consumed by ‘unstructured publics’ (Jarvie, 1970). Film festivals promote a variety of independent and mainstream cinema art production, seeing their mission in keeping alive cultural alternatives to mass-marketed art consumption such as television and ‘blockbuster’ movie production (Stringer, 2003).

Film festivals are a world-wide cultural network phenomenon of well over thousand seasonal event productions (De Valck, 2007; Vogel, 2015). Festive events are now cases of a ‘conventional mode of cooperation for the collective pursuit of art’ (Becker, 1974). What makes them special is that they are non-profit organized sites of art quality construction (Beckert & Musselin, 2013; Lampel & Meyer, 2008), and for precisely that reason attractive settings for industry and policy makers aside from artists seeking valorization. Their fast spread toward the end of the twentieth century represents nothing less than the ‘eventization’ of the cinema field, paralleling and foreboding similar change in other fields of arts/cultural production. As such, festivals and their events are exciting objects for a sociological investigation into the dynamics of contemporary, global capitalism which, according to Gernot Böhme (2017), is dependent on ‘show value’ and supported by the platform economy (Srnicek, 2020; Zuboff, 2019) where show value circulates globally and unlike much

© ANN VOGEL, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004523968_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

other value, quite evenly—reaching even poor communities and affecting them. Festivals like those in the service of cinema are a small population in the universe of formal organization and their events are aesthetic-social formats among many other event types. Yet, their location in the structure of capitalism, and the cinema field in particular, warrants attention for their role in the reconfiguration of economy and society. This suggests a reconstruction of the relationship between the widely observed role of aesthetics in the contemporary cultural emphasis on novelty, surprise, and uniqueness and the specific role of the curatorial art of experience-making (Ventzislavov, 2014) on one hand and the rationalization processes that have furthered western capitalism to become global on the other hand (Reckwitz, 2020; Weber, 1978). The perspective adopted here is that there is an investigable social process of festivalization, which this book explores based on observations on transformations in cinema and the significant cultural value bestowed today on ‘the experience’.

‘Manufacturing’ cultural diversity and creating affordances for pro-social atmospheres, organizing the conditions for charismatic moments, exuberance, and valorization in local event settings and adjacent media environments, film festivals have gained trust over the decades of their existence, showing capabilities of creating some feel of certainty, hierarchy, and symbolic value for aesthetic goods (De Valck, 2016). A set of them has been successful in attaining a quasi-fiduciary status, safeguarding cinema’s diversity and collective cultural memory, watching over cinema's central role in broader culture, cultural-policy and heritage portfolios. No wonder then that cinema's ‘art worlds’ (Becker, 1982) have embraced them as democratic institutions which mobilize art interest and galvanize art production. With the growth of both organizations and events, however, critical voices from within the community of film professionals and curatorial artists have increasingly gained track. Querying the nature of the economy arising from the seasonal reproduction of festival events and their relentless co-production of cinematic novelties, film festivals have been accused to function as bottlenecks and elitist events rather than gateways for independent cinema art and communal participation. Looking at grants and subsidies perhaps more closely as competition for them has risen, some have argued that economic success is not shared more equally. In the academic quarters of festival observers and practitioners, festivals have been critically viewed as undergoing ‘commodification’, ‘commercialization’, and ‘economization’ during the neoliberal age (Cousins, 2012; De Valck, 2007; Gass, 2012A4).

Others have suggested that while film festivals have remained close to their democratic missions as civil-society organizations defining ‘issues’ concerning a global population (for global cinema see Wagner, 2015), they have become

‘repositories and archives of failed revolutions’ (Elsaesser, 2005). Such views are particularly interesting in light of cinema manifestos (MacKenzie, 2014), constituting an archive of hopes for aesthetic and social change that spans over one-hundred years and attesting to lineages of modern artist generations’ will for more autonomy and power—away from capital, market, patronage, and a censoring state. These criticisms suggest a few things:

In light of the ubiquity of cultural things, festivals have been suspected as accomplices in the ‘oversupply of art and artists’, festivals can challenge us to rethink Howard Becker's claim that art which does not get distributed, will not get made (1982, pp. 94-95). Experience-makers such as these festivals appear to ensure that their exhibited art gets made largely without economic returns, directing our attention towards alternative economic practices which are institutionalized yet may have weakened legitimacy as they continue to mature. What appears to keep most cinema artists embracing film festivals for their cultural services away from gainful economic work seems to be an investigable ‘economic world reversed’ (Bourdieu, 1983). Time may be of the essence, as film and many other arts/cultural events are now exposed to the digitization of event culture that accelerated with the global covID-19 pandemic (De Valck & Damiens, 2020; Rankine & Giberti, 2021). Nothing less than this pandemic and related health-policy measures have led to a breakdown of an entire industry at the core of the ‘experience economy’ (Christensen, 2009), putting creative and cultural work into more precarious situations than ever before, with governments paying little attention to independent artists’ social needs.

The history of film festivals entails an observable intermediary function and a rather ubiquitous choice of eventive nonprofits for symbolic value creation, which goes for many creative/cultural production fields (Moeran & Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011), calling for a deeper analysis into the purposes and benefits of arts-nonprofit organizations in economic activities and economic coordination. Some, like Ragan Rhyne (2009), have advocated the study of power relations that they see as basis of ‘a global non-profit festival sector’, involving ‘stakeholders’ and particular forms of money, and also a cultural division of labor, distinguishable by a disproportionately volunteered workforce and minimal core of professional workers that bear the marks of highly flexibilized work organizations (Lang et al., 2006; Loist, 2011).

The civil-society dimension is important to the following analysis of these ‘entrepreneurial’ nonprofits and their contingents of cultural workers, seeking a clearer view of the institutional complex that drives the productions of artistic novelties and reputational contests as facilitated by film festivals. I thereby take a step back from the specter of neoliberalism while keeping the focus on festivals as economic actors rather than occupants of a non-profit sector. Just like for enterprises in the ‘formal economy’ (Fligstein, 2001, pp. 10-15), there are rules and types of structures pertaining to arts-festival organizations, their event productions and their organizational and institutional environments. There are governments and elites, which are essential co-productive agents in maintaining social and economic order. There are observable dynamics by which markets are created and stabilized, with dynamics unfolding among markets pertaining to cinema and other media; finally, the relations between market dynamics and the ‘internal life of organizations’ can be studied . Unlike many economic sociologists who keep to studying the ‘real economy’, analyzing firms and markets (cf. Swedberg, 2003), my investigation takes a look at how charitable phenomena happen to do well not just on the perimeter of that ‘real’ economy but play in locations that render a structural role for them in market formation, stability and transformation, which is fully economic.

Festivals are not just ‘cultural phenomena’; they offer rather strategically and bound forms of opportunities for field actors who seek to manage their risks in highly uncertain social, and mainly economic, environments. The uncertainty of aesthetic goods—which are produced with cultural meanings of novel and unique, or making an experience—is typically regarded as essential to the goods themselves. An example is the motion-picture industry which, as a leading aesthetic-economic industry, continues to discursively construct its own history as a natural market forces account (Wasko, 2007).

Uncertainty, however, is perfectly social in make, primarily traceable to an instituted western conception of art and creativity (Becker, 2017), socially existing diverse taste preferences in audiences and consumers—which have grown in their instability as consumption offers have increased tremendously (Karpik, 2010; Schwartz, 2004)—, and being incorporated into entrepreneurial strategies in order to succeed in a wide variety of the most common form of the market, i.e., consumer-goods markets (Petrovic, 2005; Zukin, 2004), including more narrowly defined but ever-widening offers of aesthetic-economic and aesthetic digital goods. In this book, I will construct arguments addressing these patterns, including mixed economies, with two frameworks I deem particularly suitable for the study of economic coordination. These are ‘grants economics’ (Boulding, 1973) and the ‘economics of singularities’ (Karpik, 2010). Together with a set of empirical investigations into aspects of film festivals as cinema-field participants, these frames will aid mobilizing new tactical viewpoints that help interrogate the still taken-for-granted status of nonprofit organizations in today’s economy and the convenience this status presents for governments under the pressure of ‘performing’ austerity while keeping people engaged in experience economies (Schulze, 1992). My analysis—performed in a number of steps and across micro, meso, and macro entities and associated arguments provided by other scholars aims to bring to light some evidence for the following larger argument about the social process of festivalization:

1 Eventization and the Hidden Hand of Economism

Firstly, contrary to economic (and mainstream economic-sociological) conventions which treat nonprofits as substitutes for inevitably failing state and market action in the face of minority demands, I address the overwhelming choice of non-profit entities in the coordination of cultural goods circulation. The paradox of experience-making emerges as a central social force to attract a paying audience and industry attention while relying heavily on a nonprofit distribution channel. My analysis shows the value of nonprofit-art circulation and subsistence by non-profit means—including volunteered time, grants, and irregular income from sponsorship deals—for experience economies and shows which roles creative individuals and immersive environments play in the reproduction of this pattern. I argue that festival nonprofits—far from being the representatives of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand (1981)—provide economic mechanisms which ease the translation of cultural value into economic value, thereby serving artists, audiences, and elites. Their presence in arenas of aesthetic-economic activity co-creates constant streams of ideas alluding to creativity and cultural diversity which governments have found useful to propel in an era in which major economic power has been accorded to corporations, structurally challenging the sovereignty of nation-states. Governments try to counter with a soft-power approach which, firstly, legitimizes them as protectors of unique cultural value, secondly, provides meaningful work for cultural producers, and thirdly, gives business opportunities for profit-seekers in the realm of creative value extraction.

2 Elites, Postmodern Heroes and Attention

Secondly, I argue that the accelerated expansion of post-traditional fest culture (Giorgi et al., 2011) arises from the intended and non-intended consequences of the pursuits of projects by ‘strategic elites’ (Keller, 1968) by which elites aim to realize their goals and visions associated with a particular condition of society theorized as aesthetic capitalism (Reckwitz, 2017b, 2020). For their visions—often of society writ large—elites seek stable environments which appear to turn out highly uncertain frames for action. The provision for many cultural and social policy goals in the period of the ‘austerity’ state points to the shift from a Keynesian welfare state pattern to a Post-Keynesian Welfare State (Jessop, 1999).! The associated understanding of ‘good governance’ entails the abandoning of legacy redistributive policy in the western world and its hindrance of emergence in developing countries under pressure by market fundamentalism at all levels of governance since about the 1980s. Workfare regime and the privatization of cultural and social policy goods characterize this so-called neoliberal governance. This investigation seeks to understand the experience-making presence of festival nonprofits in the environment of a Post-Keynesian Welfare State (Jessop, 1999).

Examining the arts-nonprofit workforce invites a broader institutional perspective on the conditions of arts entrepreneurialism. In the cultural and creative economy, there is a little examined role for philanthropy, a role relating to the justification of self-appointed stewardship of culture by wealth elites. Adopting a larger frame, we can understand contemporary philanthropy in its endeavor to do what Max Weber as theorist of western capitalism deemed unthinkable, namely to rationalize the ‘charitable impulse’, a project that is discernible in nonprofit management and grant-making patterns and traceable to wealth elites and their foundations (Hwang & Powell, 2009). Philanthropy has been largely left out of theories of capitalism despite powerful critiques of philanthropic wealth and its influence and relationship to nonprofit activity and inequality (McGoey, 2016; Shipman et al., 2018). The rationalization of the charitable impulse in times of the emergence of a creativity discourse and its hegemonial manifestation (Reckwitz, 2017b) provide an opportunity to understand why arts nonprofits have become so relevant to today’s aesthetic-economic dynamics of capitalism.

3 From Charity to Benevolent Competition— Collusion of Philanthropy and Political Elites

Thirdly, the transformation of the welfare state (the focus of critics of neoliberalism) has been observable in the ‘hire’ of nonprofit organizations, to enter and co-create policy arenas deemed relevant as areas of governance. This reliance on ‘civil society actors’ is part of a broader transformation of the welfare-state into a ‘taxation state’, whereby governments have allowed corporate and social wealth elites to exempt themselves from the state’s monopolistic hold

1 For Jessop, national state in contrast to a nation-state refers to formally sovereign territorial states that preside over a ‘national’ territory (1999, p. 381). I adopt the term throughout the book.

on taxation (and, to some degree, from regulation). Establishing themselves as visionaries, managers, and grant-makers of charities and backed by a powerful cultural imaginary known as ‘the third sector’, such elites have been offered a compact in which nonprofit activity as rationalized charity is allowed to engage in economic activities and help deliver policy goals—goals which may originate in ‘grassroots’ movement activism but can also spring from various political and economic elites’ strategies which may align with middle-class and professional elite groups’ interests in the implementation of their conceptions of the welfare of a society—conceptions that would resonate with the pluralistic and democratic expectations the socializing of which would historically have been the achievements of the Keynesian welfare state.

This shift in allocational paradigms is in no obvious way associated with the sustained advocacy of what has been enthusiastically called the ‘renaissance’ of the civil society—a cultural imaginary that has been co-produced by philanthropic, academic, public-intellectual, and public-policy elites, nearly replacing the critical discourse of public sphere. This pattern of unelected elites coming to unprecedented power and their alliance with creatives whose ‘economic impulse’ (Weber, 2003) they aim to mobilize (Giridharadas, 2019) entails the powerful idea that civil society mediates conflicts between a constraining state and a market that must be freed.

4 The Renaissance Ideology

Fourthly, this analysis cannot do without an inquiry into the contours and consequences of the renaissance ideology of a world-spanning ‘global civil society’ (Powell, 2007) which is too easily subsumed under market critique and thereby weakened. Theorists of late-modern capitalism have focused much of their critique on the activation policies in the austere Post-Keynesian welfare state (e.g., Dorre et al., 2015) without expanding their critique to ‘culturalization’ (Reckwitz, 2020). The expansive adoption of meritocratic competitions for ‘attractive’ cultural offers, which may replace social policy or simply overwhelm it with creativity ideology (Reckwitz, 2014b), and ‘event power’ by a global civil society are roped in for solving problems ‘innovatively’ which rise from the conduct of neoliberal economic policies (Rojek, 2013). This shift characterizes the end of a strong Keynesian state and the activation via ‘culturalizing’ strategies in which economic coordination between for-profits and nonprofit organizations seems natural.