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Festivals: Between Sacred Ritual and the Consumerist Profane

2023; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-39752-3_2

2523-7314

Waldemar Kuligowski, Marcin Poprawski,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

In 1996, as part of the First Edinburgh University Festival Lecture, George Steiner suggested that there had been an exponential growth in the number of festivals, even leading to “festivals of festivals” being organised, and that the whole process had reached a level of “absurdity” (Steiner 1996). Fifteen years later, Michael Eavis, creator of the iconic European Glastonbury Festival, announced the inevitable and imminent end of the event. This rather surprising, given that the festival had suffered from neither a lack of fan interest (nearly 200,000 festival-goers at each edition), nor from a lack of willing performers (the world’s biggest stars appeared on stage), or from declining media interest. However, the organiser of the festival, which has been taking place since 1970, suggested that his event would only be able to survive for three to four years at most: “We sell out only because we get huge headliners. In the year Jay-Z played we nearly went bankrupt. I don’t see the market will be there in the future” (Festivals are dead! 2011). He added that audiences were now bored with the format of summer outdoor music events and predicted that as a result the festival boom would simply come to an end.