CARNIVALS FOR ELITES - THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF ARTS FESTIVALS

Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, academic study of arts festivals has been neglected. This article examines how cyclical arts festivals transform places from being everyday settings into temporar y environments that contribute to the production, processing and consu mption of culture, concentrated in time and place. Moreover, festivals also provide examples of how culture is contested. Support for the ar ts is part of a process used by elites to establish social distance be tween themselves and others. Festivals have traditionally been innovat ive and have always been controlled. In the past, artistic directors w ielded this control but recent attempts by commercial interests to con trol festivals reflect a wider situation in which marketing agencies a nd managers are transforming arts and culture into arts and culture in dustries. Today, promoting arts festivals is related to place promotio n, and this encourages 'safe' art forms. This highlights latent tensio ns between festival as art and economics, between culture and cultural politics.