Marketing Difference at the Adelaide Festival

Abstract

Comedian Barry Humphries is reputed to have said that arts festivals are ‘good for Australians’ because ‘they allow us to get a year’s worth of culture over and done with in a couple of weeks’ (quoted in Waites, 1987: 2). As well as satirizing the ‘typical’ (sports-loving) Australian’s apparent lack of sustained interest in the arts, this quip, made nearly two decades ago, indexes a mode of cultural exposure/consumption that has become increasingly prevalent within many parts of the nation. All Australian state and territory capitals now host annual or biennial international arts festivals, which, in combination, draw a considerable segment of the total audience for major performing arts events and demand an ever-increasing slice of the industry’s funding pie. While this trend is undoubtedly linked to the marked expansion of the international festival circuit in response to the globalization of national cultural economies, the growing emphasis on festival culture in Australia, seemingly among the most pronounced in the Western world, can also be traced to specific local interests and state imperatives, not least of which is the desire to develop and project cosmopolitan tastes/identities. This chapter examines the cosmopolitics of marketing and consuming Aboriginal and Asian performances at the Adelaide International Festival, widely acknowledged as the nation’s premier arts event.

Gaining visibility for the politically under-represented without scrutinizing the power of who is required to display what to whom is an impoverished political agenda.

(Peggy Phelan, 1993: 26)