1 Authors: Fabian Holt and Francesco Lapenta Chapter for The Handbook of Experience Economy

The Social Experience of Cultural Events

Conceptual Foundations and Analytical Strategies

1. Introduction CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter presents a systematic review of conventional approaches to the experience of cultural events. The argument is that valuable approaches exist in various fields of study, but that the deeper conceptual foundations have yet to be clarified and examined. To this end, the present chapter reviews existing approaches from an essentially sociological perspective on cultural experience as something that not only involves shared experience and interaction in a particular situation, but also life-style aspects, social agendas, and world views. One of the distinctive features of cultural events is their ability to engage participants in the experience of issues and agendas in both simple and complex forms. The bulk of the chapter is a theoretical outline that reviews and synthesizes complementary perspectives in the fields of sociology, communication studies, and business studies for understanding the key dimensions in the evolution of cultural events over the course of the past couple of decades. More important than ever before is the media dimension, which has been overlooked because events have historically been defined by their difference from media experience, by the direct face-to-face interaction between bodies. This has led to the celebration of culture festivals and performances, for instance, as more authentic forms of social experience than disembodied media communications, separating the contexts of production and reproduction. This chapter argues that while important differences are real and existing, the romanticist narrative of the unmediated creates a false dichotomy, while in fact events and media, far from being mutually exclusive entities, have always evolved in a complex relation, even when this is not immediately obvious to organizers and participants. The recent development of social media has revolutionized the field, not only as the main communication platforms between events and participants, but also in the more intense and more layered mediations along multiple communication channels and the more expressive information medium of video in media sharing sites.

2 The main section of the chapter is reflexive outline of three complementary approaches to the study of cultural events. The outline ground these approaches in the conceptual foundations, drawing from diverse fields such as event management, media studies, and marketing theory within a sociological discourse to account for important changes in the relation between cultural events and society. After this outline, the chapter further details two contemporary contexts for contemporary cultural events. The first is the postindustrial city and its cultural economy in which contemporary event culture emerged in the 1970s. The other perspective is how cultural events are transformed through new media practices. After reading this chapter, you will be able to understand: Unique aspects of experience and participation in cultural events What it means for an event experience to be social How cultural events and their management strategies are evolving within broader processes of social and technological change How cultural events have evolved in the specific contexts of the postindustrial city and the expressive information channels of new media How analytical approaches to events emerge from broader conceptual foundations The three core analytical concepts of situations, spheres, and leverage

THE CHANGING ROLE OF CULTURAL EVENTS IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Cultural events have gained new and expanded functions in society since the 1980s when the term festivalization appeared in the context of urban renewal and gentrification (Harvey 1991; Holt with Wergin 2012).1 The field of cultural events includes commercial events organized for profit at one end and events organized by artists, public institutions, and NGOs for more philanthropic purposes in the other. Overall, however, it is frequently difficult to distinguish between these interests. Many music and cultural festivals, for instance, illustrate the eroding boundaries in neoliberal societies between state, market, and civil society (see, e.g. Scammel 2000). They involve all three sectors and engage participants as both citizens and consumers. The reason festivals attract interest across society is that they are increasingly recognized for their ability to mediate agendas of a complex world and not least for engaging people in these agendas through embodied, localized participation. Thus, cultural events increasingly become sites where civic utopian narratives of philanthropy, social movements, and sustainability are intersecting with narratives of economic

3 growth through consumption, tourism, and place marketing. Cultural events, moreover, have entered the mainstream of social life. In the process, they have lost some of their autonomy as a utopian "third spaces" for sharing and imagining alternative futures in social movements and subcultures, for instance. The evolution in media practices has contributed to this development. Events have taken on new functions, not only a local, live, full sensory experience valued in discourse of authentic bodily presence and participation. They have also taken on new functions in the development of strategies for employing new media platforms in complex constellations to maximize the impact of events in a landscape of fragmented and fluid audiences. YouTube, for instance, is strategically positioning itself and indirectly also Google as the leading global platform for video broadcasts of important cultural events, with the implication that the platform not only gives access to but also creates a global mass public culture. New media practices have intensified the communication dynamics of cultural events. Corporate brand events, for instance, have integrating techniques of installation art, interactive features, and eventually social video for strategic circulation in global social media. Participatory media culture and its blurring of social spheres are also manifest among industry events that are increasingly taking advantage of organizing public festivities outside the closed halls of the trade fair to exploit the public attention in the media to influence policy makers and consumers. The changes in contemporary media culture have led to a point where the differences between live and mediated experience are used more strategically and constitute a powerful and necessary combination. The live event has become a fixture of corporate communications, even when events and media campaign activities are prioritized and combined differently. The media perspective is integrated in the conception of the event to optimize participation and the quality of media content. Thus, the media perspective no longer enters after the fact. The event has become a driver of media participation. It gains power from its localized experience in its context of origin and is consumed in a parallel array of mediated communications, interactions, and representations.

2. Approaches and Concepts for the Study of Cultural Events

The field of events management has been dominated by applied research approaches in the organizational nexus of city governments, commercial corporations,

4 event production companies, and communications agencies. These applied approaches have generally been slow to develop a theoretically grounded understanding of the historical, economic, and social dynamics of cultural events. Also lacking are conceptual distinctions between different levels of analysis. The events management literature is known outside academic circles for textbooks that are useful for the practical planning and organization of a variety of events (e.g. Allen et al. 2008; Bowdin 2006; Richards and Palmer 2010). Many of these books are similar to guides for planning communication campaigns; they prescribe models of practice rather than analyzing and conceptualizing those practices. In this discourse, events are organized not for the sake of the experience itself, but for strategic and instrumental interests in branding organizations and places. In the 2000s, many city governments institutionalized and rebranded their events planning and permission departments into departments for events, culture, and tourism. This was in many cases influenced by Floridas (2002) ideas about creative cities. There is also a more specialized research literature that has appeared in journals such as Festival Management & Event Tourism and various journals of tourism, marketing, and management. However, it is still largely applied research and often concentrates on the sports events industry. The sports industry has always had a bigger mass appeal, with broadcasts to mass media audiences, more sponsorship and advertising, and for these and other reasons not only sport events professionalization happened earlier then in the field of cultural events, but it also received greater attention in research and related literature. This article does not focus on sports events, but rather on the current professionalization and evolution in cultural events. Although it does not exclude that some overlapping patterns characterize these different industries, it focuses on some key differences. One of the fundamental differences between sports event and culture event is the generally central role, in cultural events, of representations of self and social life, a particular cultural mimesis, to speak with Aristotle, including subtle distinctions and narratives around concepts of taste, age, and class. In the more art-oriented events, reflexivity tends to play an important role, and they sometimes presuppose familiarity with the canons and sophistication of high culture genres (Eyerman 2006, 21). In comparison, sports emphasize bodily action and the rules of game. To narrow down the areas of interest of this chapter the following types of cultural events are included in its critical framework: a) festivals for cities, communities, cultures, art forms; b) art and book fairs; c) expositions integrating culture with science and technology; d) large public celebrations,

5 ceremonies, and commemorations; e) promotional events organized around cultural performance. A common misunderstanding in the cultural events literature is that events can be organized more or less without specialist knowledge of content. Cultural events generally require most specialist knowledge of content, as their core identity emerges from the particular combination of performances or installations that needs to be curated for this particular event and to give meaning to the particular time, place, and audience. Thus, the DNA of a cultural event is often created through curatorial work of the core content, not just the visual design and story-telling or other more external components. This makes the curator or programmer a vital part of the event organization. The curation of cultural events requires analysis of talent, tastes, and interests among specific consumer segments and the dynamics of fashions or trends. A super star concert is fairly simple to curate because it is mainly about the market for one artist. But if the artist is performing as part of a special event, how do we know if it is the right artist for this particular event? In most cultural events such as music festivals, film festivals, urban cultural festivals, and art biennials, the curatorial process involves the invention of a creative concept and a large group of artists, activities, and locals with the goal of creating a coherent vision. Professional curators of cultural events routinely testify to the importance of creating a program that is very contemporary, even visionary, because it is in the nature of events to constantly innovate and be ahead of the curve by exposing audiences to new cultural forms. This is partly because the event is an act of communication with a news value, but also because it requires more effort on the part of the consumer to participate in a festival, fair, exposition or public performance or ceremony for instance, than watching a television show or reading a blog, and there are now more cultural events on offer than ever before. The chapter builds on a conventional conception of expressive culture in the humanities to include both the arts and popular culture, but the chapter recognizes and examines issues pertaining to the expansion of culture outside the conventional boundaries of culture; what has been called art worlds (Becker 1984) and the field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993) in the sociology of art. The evolving discourse of experience economy in Northern European business studies is precisely linked with the aestheticization of everyday life and service environments, involving a higher design intensity, more events, and within these contexts also the appropriation of ex-

6 pressive culture. In this context of consumer and corporate culture, culture and cultural experience are generally used as strategic entertainment. Culture becomes, in Ydices (2003) now famous phrase, an expedient. Culture has increasingly become a tool in agendas of economic growth, mediating social conflicts, and philanthropic causes. The concept of event, whether it is a social, sports, or cultural event, involves a break from the mundane everyday. The event is defined by a duality of exhibition and festivity, and it brings together communicative acts of curation, presentation, performance, and consumer interaction. For participants, the recognition that many others are congregating in the same place creates energy and expectations for a special occasion. This is called eventfulness. However, with culture, a special energy can emerge in the encounter with culture in its extraordinary context. For instance, the live music experience at a music festival or concert involves more than a musical experience, as music scholars have tended to think. But it is also more than a general feeling of festivity and eventfulness, as event management discourse would say. When any kind of art is effectively contextualized in an event, it comes alive as a social experience with meanings derived from its articulation in a special social domain outside of its everyday domain of art consumption. Although the contemporary field of professional cultural events has been subject of little theorization, the broader conceptual foundations do not need to be invented from scratch. In the events management literature, authors commonly define events citing definitions in previous publications, complemented with common knowledge, without grounding it theoretically, and this limits the field and leaves it somewhat disconnected from research on events in other fields. It is not only the practitioners discourse, but also the early attempts at theorization in performance studies and media studies that lack a diverse but integrated disciplinary approach. The dominant conceptions of performance in the field of performance studies evolve from the pioneer works of the 1960s by Schechner (2003) [1977] and Turner (1969). They built on anthropological studies of traditional ritual events and integrated perspectives of behavioral sociology and theatrical performances. At the time, mass culture and media were marginal topics in the large areas of humanities, and they are still met with skepticism in performance studies (Auslander 1999). In the 1970s, media and live events were still considered relatively separate empirical domains in academia. There was not really an academic discourse on cultural events. Only in

7 the quiet recent post-ritual events literature have scholars taken interest in analytical perspectives on publics and media in communication studies and sociology. This happened to some extent inside performance studies (Ibid.), but the perspectives did not evolve there, but instead in media studies and sociology. It is indicative that the field grew from a conception of the media event in linguistic categories of syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntactically, media events may be characterized, first, by our elements of interruption, monopoly, being broadcast live, and being remote, writes Dayan and Katz (1992, 10). This definition was underwritten by a neoDurkheimian perspective of media events as occasions where television makes possible an extraordinary shared experience of watching events at societys centre (Couldry and Hepp 2011, 3). Media events and liveness research has contributed to the understanding of important dimensions of performances and events in contemporary society, but is complementary because it does not primarily analyze participation in physical events. At the end of this chapter we shall explore the role that new media are acquiring in the redefinition of the individual, collective, local and global discourse that cultural events propose to inspire. For a more complete and systematic account of conceptual foundations for the study of cultural events, the following typology can be offered. The typology organizes strands of research on fundamental aspects of events. The strands have evolved within different disciplines, but to situate concepts and approaches in a broader interdisciplinary perspective, it is useful to understand these approaches in context. Moreover, they are complementary as they focus on different levels of analysis and are necessary for accounts of the notorious multitude of cultural events. This multitude may be difficult to account for in scholarly terms, but it is easy to identify. When a big event is occurring, for instance, media reports frequently ask participants and experts about the nature of the event in the attempt at explaining it to their media audiences. This produces numerous definitions that point out myriad aspects but does not create a coherent narrative. Questions about the nature of a major event are difficult to handle even for specialist scholars, and the nature of the event is often described as an enigma in journalism, providing statements by participants about their intense moments of experience. Scholarly writing about events is confronted with the same fundamental challenge of multitude. To constructively approach the problem in this article we offer an integrated typology that might provide useful insights to initiate a now necessary multimodal and interdisciplinary approach to the
2

8 study of cultural events.

A) SITUATIONAL APPROACHES TO PERFORMANCE IN ANTHROPOLOGY, PERFORMANCE STUDIES, AND SOCIOLOGY

The first type of approaches are the situational approaches that grew out of an engagement with rituals and social behavior in pre-industrial and industrial societies without the same social fluidity and media complexity of contemporary advanced societies. The situational approaches tend to privilege an analytical focus on the immediate context of performance. They tend to stay within the temporal-spatial boundaries of the microenvironment. The scholarly contribution lies in the capacity to not just describe individual experiences and situations, but patterns of behavior and types of situations. This explains the centrality of concepts such as ritual and performance. Situational approaches are also characterized by an interest in how the situation relates to social life more broadly, e.g. how it articulates and challenges everyday values and agendas in society. However, the prime site of inquiry was the situation itself, not its social or electronic mediations or the decision-making in institutions, for instance. Meyrowitz (1985) offered a pioneer critique of situational approaches: In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the examination of social episodes, settings, and contexts. Studies, theories, and critiques have suggested that personality measures are often poor predictors of everyday social behavior and that behaviors such as anxiety reactions are largely shaped by situational factors. [] As of now, the research on situations has supported the plausibility of situationism more than it has advanced toward a general theory of situations and behavior. Although there have been many empirical and analytical studies of situations, most of this work has focused on describing situation-specific behaviors as they exist at a particular time in a given culture. There has been relatively little work explaining the general process through which situations affect behavior, there have been few attempts at generating propositions for predicting why and how social situations change, and there have been virtually no analyses of how behavior will change when situations change (Meyrowitz 1985, 27 and 32). This critique has paradigmatic implications. It puts conventional situational approaches into a completely new perspective by adopting comparative methodological

9 discourse of sociology and media studies. the critique highlights previously unrecognized boundaries of the situational approaches and points to the necessity of looking not just at more dimensions of the situation and the experience, but at the conceptual and disciplinary discourse. In a word, a situation can only be fully understood by considering the more complex structure of society and other forms of communication and experience. In particular, mediation and social change have been and are still to some extent ignored in studies with a situational approach. The epistemological risk is situationism; the isolation from the forces and contexts needed to explain the meanings and values of the situation. The concept of situational approaches is used in this chapter in a broad sense for a shared perspective in research within different traditions, but particularly anthropology, sociology, and later performance studies. The founding figures in sociology such as Durkheim (1912) and Weber (1968) studied traditional rituals and ceremonies as part of large-scale theories of society, and it was this ritual perspective that was picked up in the research traditions that evolved with a more specialist focus, notably the folklorist van Gennep (1909) and anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss and Turner. A different but clearly situational form of specialized inquiry is represented by Goffmanns (1959) study of social behavior. Situational approaches, moreover, dominate the field of performance studies that draws heavily on theatre studies and has a strong interest in sited performances of extended theatricality (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 2004). Situational approaches continue to dominate in analyses centering on new performance spaces and experiences in those spaces.

B) PUBLIC SPHERE AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT APPROACHES IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES AND SOCIOLOGY

Meyrowitz convincingly argues that situational perspectives need to be complemented by knowledge of how media communications affects social behaviors in situations. Situations change over time, but not just through media. Changes in demographics, education, political culture, and cultural policies are frequently playing into such social processes of change. But between social behavior and broader social change is a crucial level for the analysis of the event experience. This is the level that can be analyzed from the concept of the event sphere. The event sphere is the microcosm that emerges within the time and place of the event. Rather than simply being a gated physical territory for a number of activities, the event is a social, aesthetic, and historical space constructed through the curation of content, communications, and designs that shape the core audience and the attitudes, ethics, and at-

10 mosphere that emerge through participations. The event sphere should also not be confused with the identity of the event. Rather, it is a complex whole of interaction between different identities and images of the event among the diverse audiences of a mass event. The event sphere is also a fictional space, as illustrated by the fairy tales and themed areas of Disney World or the utopia counterculture of the Glastonbury rock festivals. The fiction takes on a performative dimension through liminal behavior, participant role-playing, installations, and costumes. The event sphere, moreover, is an imaginary social order of a small society, usually modeled on mythical notions of a pre-modern village, even when fused with futuristic scenarios. In a festival area, for instance, a temporary micro society emerges with its own eco system of camp sites, markets, and subcultures with a daily rhythm over the course of a couple of days or more. Annual events gain a life-story dimension for participants and communities as a special occasion that puts past and present into perspective. The event sphere also involves specific elements such as emotional atmosphere, attitudes and ethical rules among participants, event architecture, and spatial design, all of which helps create the sense of a coherent and recognizable event. The event sphere is not an established concept, but recent research on cultural festivals has opened up a path of conceptualizations drawing on public sphere theory. Public sphere theory is historically linked to political culture, and a political public sphere is not the same as a festival or event public sphere. Above all, an event sphere is not necessarily political. Some events are conceived more within a service logic of the entertainment industry than within the cultural logic of difference to be found in cultural festivals in which ideology and social consciousness are defining aspects and motivating forces. In his pioneer work on the public sphere concept, Habermas (1962) described the emergence of urban cultural consumer spaces such as cafes, theaters, and concert halls, but he also ascribed crucial importance to discourse and the ideological aspects of culture, which have later been developed in theory of counterpublics; publics characterized by resistance, opposition, and difference: The idea of a public is motivating, not simply instrumental. It is constitutive of a social imaginary. [W]hen people address publics, they engage in struggles over the conditions that bring them together as a public (Warner 2002, 12).

11 The formation of counterpublics has been studied in various strands of cultural sociology, from social movement studies (Eyerman and Jamison 1991) to urban collectivity studies (Maffesoli 1996), and beyond to the recent public sphere approach to cultural festivals (Delanty, Giorgi, and Sassatelli 2011). The public sphere approach is particularly helpful for analyzing how cultural festivals engage participants socially through the experience collectivity and difference. Sennett emphasizes this aspect of diversity in his discussion of changing meanings of public culture in modernity. In his critique of contemporary culture, Sennett points out that [public once] meant not only a region of social life located apart from the realm of family and close friends [it also meant that] this public realm of acquaintances and strangers included a relatively wide diversity of people (Sennett 1974, 17). Sennetts study is relevant to a critical discussion of the developments of cultural events as strategic entertainment in the postindustrial city. In particular, his skeptical description of vulgar intimacy, self-realization, and withdrawal from societal commitment provides are echoed in contemporary cultural policy debates (Ibid, esp. 8-9). We are now seeing an increasing differentiation between cultural events in the conventional cultural sector and in the events industry emerging out of the service and tourisms industries.
C) GENERALIST AND SPECIALIST APPROACHES IN ECONOMICS AND MARKETING STUDIES

Scholarship on events in economics and more applied disciplines such as marketing and management largely use the same general approaches developed from studies of more established and larger industries. Research on the role of events in the economy of tourism and cities, for instance, has adopted conventional models of input-output and cost-benefit analysis. Similarly, marketing research has operated from the fundamental idea of events as one of the mediums or avenues in the marketing mix, exploring its unique aspects of experience but still within a medium logic. These and other general approaches are useful for certain purposes, and they serve a particular role as tools of generalization and legitimization in impact studies. However, the generalist approaches do not capture what is unique about events. Moreover,

12 theory developed from the analysis of events has continued to question the applicability of not just generalist models but also conventional principles of economics. This theory, moreover, suggests that the social experience is key to understanding economic activity in events. What follows is a discussion of these specialist approaches that account for aspects particular to events. A fundamental aspect of approaches to event economics is their attempt at capturing the flows of economic activity following the particular social conditions and processes that constitute a cultural event for participants and business partners. The unique social value of the event to its various actors to create different economic and organizational arrangements. The disruption of everyday routines in the experience of a festival, for instance, also applies to the extraordinary supply-chain arrangements and the symbolic values for brands and local communities. The first treatment of basic principles in event economics was conducted in Baumol and Bowens influential study Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (1966) that used the performing arts as a model case for questioning conventional wisdom on the relation between labor productivity and inflation in classic economics. Baumol and Bowens argued that because there is little or no productivity gain in an opera or theatre performance, the costs will rise faster than inflation and grow disproportionally compared with sectors with a productivity gain. Moreover, the wages have grown in opera houses because wages have grown in other labor markets where productivity has gone up. In the field of culture, productivity gain has happened especially in mass media distribution of entertainment. While this theory known as Baumols disease remains true, the question about why the market value of performances and events have gone up in the age of digital media has caused scholars to think further. Frith argues on sociological grounds that the reason for the relatively prosperous economy of live music events such as concerts and festival is the unique social values of the live experience. The value of music (the reason why people are prepared to pay money for it) remains centered in its live experience (Frith 2007, 4). The central role of social experience also forms the ground of the new marketing approach developed around the concept of social leverage by Chalip and OBrien (2007). They were motivated by the recognition that sport events stakeholders have started to look beyond impact in a conventional sense to achieve longer-term sustainable outcomes. The authors also document a widespread scholarly critique of impact studies, not to mention the fact that rigorous impact studies have frequently

13 arrived at disappointing results about the economic impact of events. Chalip and OBrien developed an alternative to impact studies with potentially paradigmatic implications. Instead of focusing on outcomes, the effects, after the event, they focus on how events create value and work from the assumption that the main value comes from their ability to leverage processes beyond the event itself. For instance, an event might not generate profit within its immediate value chain, but it can create social values, networks, and business in other industries, and for this reason many events receive donations from sponsors and city governments. In order to leverage the impacts, Chalip and OBrien argue, a new analytical approach with a focus strategic optimization is needed. They crucially introduce a turn away from measuring impacts to optimizing leverage (see also Chalip 2004 and 2006). Their research has produced a useful marketing model for systematically optimizing values for participants, sponsors, media, and the community. The model is useful for big events with a complex structure but the principles are the same for small events. The model is concerned with physical participation and conventional approaches to broadcast media, so it can productively be complemented and developed with knowledge of new media spaces and practices. The marketing optimization approach has potential to integrate knowledge of new media dynamics, for instance, and its core elements can be further conceptualized to serve complex analyses of cultural events. If we look not only at the practical division into marketing units, but also at the processes in the event and its life-cycle, new perspectives open up. An event serves particular needs in distinct sites of action, but it is also a combinational entity. From an economic and commercial perspective, the micro society of the event has other functions than its role as a world of experience for participants, these can functions can be somewhat narrowed down to: a real-world consumer laboratory involving a multitude of social interaction in physical and virtual spheres a marketing medium for the promotion and sale an innovation platform for products, services, new media and knowledge a catalyst of social and economic action, elicited by extraordinary programming, mass audience formation, and site-specific intensity The combination of these functions (laboratory, medium, platform, and catalyst) ac-

14 counts for an important part of the uniqueness and potentials of cultural events for society and business. The values of cultural events are not limited to the experience of a social situation, a cultural performance, or a cultural public sphere. Events also have limitations, however. Events have a short time-span, and it is an extraordinary situation from which experience and knowledge cannot automatically be transferred and implemented into everyday routines. Although it can be perceived as a real-world laboratory, the event is not an everyday laboratory, and this is both a strength and a weakness. The intense and overwhelming impressions from many activities and people create special energies that bring out certain desires and forms of human behavior that cannot be created in everyday life. Another problem is the complexity of influences that makes it difficult to distinguish the factors influencing buying decisions, for instance. Methodically, the four functions proposed above suggest how the potentials of the marketing leverage approach can be developed into a broader and more foundational conception of socio-economic approaches to understanding events. They also suggest that renewed attention should be paid to the new media practices that now embed all cultural productions and how they can be transformed into engines of economic growth and gain. It is clear that the economic action evolves around the particular social experience of the cultural event as an extraordinary social experience and how this experience is designed, organized, produced and consumed by local and global audiences. Thus, the event becomes a node among different social and economic practices, a source for understanding social change and the evolution of experience of cultural event, and the subject for the investigation of the new organizational and economic functions and structures that emerge from it. The complement the analytical approaches and concepts discussed above, we would now like to offer two perspectives of particular relevance to contemporary cultural events: They are: New media and the postindustrial city.

3. The Evolution of Cultural Events in the Postindustrial City

The above outline of analytical approaches needs to ground the event experience in its historical dimension and processes of social change. Situated performances, publics, and socio-economic synergies are core concepts for understanding a cultural event. While cultural events relate very differently to history and society, the term

15 event and the forms of design and participation have been fundamentally shaped by the conditions of culture in the postindustrial city. The first mega events emerged in the late 19th century with the development of the Olympics and the World Expositions. They were both held in cities and played an active role in creating images of global culture. They created global publics in capital cities with financial support of nation-states. Like all events, they were born in the image of their time, reflecting the world view of Western modernity with their grandiose format and claims to universalism. With the expos, the exhibition of world cultures happened in the larger context of colonial imperialism (Roche 2000). Clearly, a power relation between the mega event and the megacity was institutionalized. In addition to the emergence of mega events with heavy involvement of the nationstate where cultural events in consumer culture and civic society. A market for public entertainment emerged with bars, clubs, dance halls, theaters, and amusement parks in urban industrial centers (Nasaw 1993). Since the 1970s, cultural events have become a fixture of urban public culture and city branding. Today more than half of the world's population live in cities, and the city and the event industry constitute now an indissoluble power relation. This originates in the post-industrial city when culture-led strategies of economic growth emerged and with them a new role of consumption. This is also the context of origin for the experience economy. Spaces of consumption were created in architecture, image, and by increasing activities such as events. In a word, the city became a landscape of consumption for a broad population demographic (Zukin 1991). The crisis in the manufacturing industries in the 1960s contributed to a general crisis in urban economies. A city such as New York was close to bankrupt in 1975, and many inner cities were not only poor but also left with empty and deteriorating buildings. The outside motivations for economic growth created a somewhat unstable ground for culture-led regeneration strategies, while they spread to smaller urban conglomerates or rural areas. The consumption economy is most directly relevant to cultural events. Indeed, culture was for the first time employed by cities as an economic basis through its two main functions of consumption and marketing (Zukin 1995, 11). This is the prime context of origin for many later policies and business discourses, including the experience economy, on emotions and aesthetics in shopping but also cultural forms such as

16 architecture, museums, and events. In these discourses of culture-led strategies of economic growth, traditional concepts of performance and ritual were replaced with cultural event. The landslide change in terminology reflects a shift from discourses of art worlds to discourses of outside agents of megacity developers, marketers, and business entrepreneurs.
THE POSTINDUSTRIAL URBAN ECONOMY

A long-term process since the 1960s, megacities have experienced a combination of changes in real-estate development and demographic changes that have changed the conditions of cultural events. Commonly identified with the term gentrification, a growing population of professional middle-classes forms the basis of a market for professional niche culture and more exclusive cultural events. In contrast, cultural events for a broader population demographic have been forced to move further away from the city center. Since the early 1999s, one of the most popular forms of mass events in cultural life is rock and pop music festivals in rural areas where space is cheap and youths can party and have camping facilities. This kind of more unregulated cultural event and festivity has become more rare in the increasingly controlled and gentrified city. The early cultural festivals of European modernity created spaces for imagining different futures in a space outside of the institutions of the market and the state. Their vision emphasized the celebration not of cities or holidays, but art and civilization and the emergence of cultural festivals (Autissier 2009, 27 and 30; BOP Consulting 2011, 99. The cultural festivals were not concentrated in capital cities, but in smaller cities, where they created new and alternative economies to the vanishing local industrial economies. The pioneer urban sociological work of Zukin (1991, 1995, and 2010) and Grazian (2003 and 2008) offer an insight in the socioeconomic dynamics at work in these processes. In a discussion of the illustrative case of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Zukin writes: It is quite a wager that this museum will create a tourist industry and that tourism will save the town from economic decline. But when the last factories have closed their gates and neither business nor government offers a different scenario, ordinary men and women can be persuaded that their city is ready to enter the symbolic economy. (Zukin 1995, 79). Two general points can be drawn from this. First, culture-led growth strategies might not resonate with all population groups and involve conflicting interests between the

17 cultural sector and other sectors. A shift from this old narrative of one-directional impact to one of synergies can be recommended. Second, the MASS MoCA is an illustrative example of two typical problems of culture-led strategies. A $1.8 million (by 1988 standards), state-financed feasibility was conducted by outsiders for this small town community, even while a fiscal crisis started generating skepticism and there was no support for the project among the local arts community (Zukin 1995, 94-96). What is more, the project became an example of smaller city culture projects with content "imported" from the city. In this case, it was objects from the Guggenheim collection in New York. The literature on the transformation of culture in the post-industrial city shows that focus in the 1970s and 1980s was on conventional venues such as museums, parks, and shopping. Later, as in the case of the MassMoCA, more emphasis was on performances and events. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is the increasing fluidity in society that tend to be in favor of events with news value and intense dynamics of momentary encounters rather than the more stable structures of cultural institutions. The permanent exhibitions of museums, and the traditional programming of concert halls, have been challenged by a growing interest in public performances in new unconventional spaces. Big concerts used to be an urban experience but are now organized, pushed by gentrification, outside in smaller urban areas or at the borders of bigger cities. A core example is the DIY rock scene that emerged in Manhattan in the 70s and has now moved to Brooklyn, New York with ad hoc rock shows in warehouses, lofts, basements, and under bridges greatly contributing to the branding of the citys borough that now strongly competes with Manhattan itself.

4. The Transformation of Cultural Events in New Media Practices

The intensification of electronic mediation in contemporary society is changing live events in complex ways. Key changes for cultural events include the communicative functions and meanings of the event itself. After detailing these aspects, we shall turn to changes in the relation with the city, with space. Before the advent of electronic mediation in the late 19th century, performances and public gatherings more generally had a privileged role in communicating important messages and sanctioning dominant agendas in the form of ceremonies and parades, for instance. Carnivals and other folk rituals served to articulate community, social values, and informal knowledge via song and dance, for instance. Electronic

18 mass media meant that information could be distributed without embodied interaction and performance, and they became the infrastructure in the era of national media. Now everyone with a radio or television could hear a public speech by the president. Performances could be enjoyed independently of time and space. In this era, cultural festivals, for instance, could create a public sphere for minorities and otherwise dispersed specialist audiences whose interests were at the margins or even excluded from the institutions of power, including mass media. This has changed with the advent of networked media that in principle allow any media user to share information, and so cultural events are no longer a privileged site for articulating community and communicating the values of that community. But cultural events remain a privileged site for the embodied experience of cultural performance and of community.

Second, media and particularly new networked and mobile media practices have created layered experiences. The event is mediated between private and public spheres, between the real and the virtual. This happens along multiple channels and through multiple forms user mediation and participation. New media practices provide many ways of sharing and tracking information. To cultural events, this propose a challenge to the private and intimate sphere that is central to building local communities with strong ties. But it is also an opportunity, as a single provocative act such as the Pussy Riot church performance in Moscow can fire up the internet across the globe.

The dimensions and meanings of events are now being defined in the contexts of social networking sites (Facebook), micro blogging platforms (Twitter) and media sharing websites (Youtube, Instagram, and Pinterest). These platforms, communicative forms and social practices are redefining the very definition of eventfulness and the spatial and social boundaries of event genres. With more media practices embedded in events, the boundaries of the extraordinary shared experience that were once defined by elements of interruption (of daily life) and monopoly (in the case of the remote live broadcast of the extraordinary event) are now eroding. Well-known examples include the narratives of self that participants create through image sharing and production in their network among friends and their public marking of event participation through the now leading user-driven event marketing in the events pages of Facebook. But more complex collective processes also occur when seemingly simple video essays of a festival, commonly produced from last years event, goes viral in network media and takes on a powerful role in maintaining and shaping participant

19 representations and experience of the event. A prominent example is the 2012 after video of the large electronic dance music festival in the Netherlands called Tomorrowland. The video had more than 30 million views on YouTube before the festival, and it follows the story-telling strategy that also penetrates the entire festival and its event architecture, drawing on models of adventure and fantasy universe from theme parks and Disney cinema. Cultural events are being redefined by qualities that blend the power of collective mediated experiences, with a more intimate and personal experiences. New media practices in a way more closely resemble the personal and social dynamics once characteristic of the middlebrow art of family photography (Bourdieu 1990). A ritualized use of media and media representations used to both separate the mundane from the exceptional, and to celebrate and consolidate individual histories, personal ties and social relations. Emerging social media representations are now overlaying all cultural events, at times enriching old forms of media coverage of collectively meaningful events; and at times, by means of their own substantial media coverage establishing an event as collectively meaningful and extraordinary (Lapenta 2011; Papacharissi 2011; Ito 2008; Ito, Baumer, Bittani et al. 2010).

5. Conclusion
The motivating idea of this chapter was to complement the existing literature on the experience economy by examining the social dimensions of experience, specifically the experience of cultural events. The existing literature in Northern Europe has so far focused on the immediate situation, on the immersive experience of individuals, from the perspective of positive psychology and marketing communications. The core point in our conceptual framework of experience is that the focus on the immediate situation is strong not only in the aforementioned fields but also in ritual theory, performance studies, and event management. By introducing the concept of public sphere we illustrated a distinctly different conception, recently developed as a postritual approach. To think of an event experience in the context of a public sphere involves other analytical levels and opens up other perspectives on the meanings and values of cultural events. The chapter than further explored the complexity of spheres and embodied experience in relation to new media practices that have so far received little attention in the conception of cultural events and in the experience economy literature.

20 The methodical rationale of the chapter, then, has been to make clear that the concept of experience, in the context of cultural events, can productively be more grounded in mainstream social science traditions. We have sought to illustrate this by integrating and synthesizing approaches and highlighted complementary aspects to build a broader and stronger understanding of the topic.

The argument about taking the broader social dimension of experience more seriously and integrating approaches, however, also confronts barriers that should not be ignored. There are divisions between the traditions from which we have drawn. Not all of them claim expertise in the social dimension, and we are willing to view our argument as a sociological intervention, as we cannot represent all disciplines but ask questions and examine problems of relevance to them. More specifically, the approaches to experience in marketing studies and in public sphere theory not only present different analytical perspectives but also involve ideological contrasts. The concept of public spheres is closely linked with notions of critical social reflexivity, including a critical stance against capitalism and the market. The contrasting perspectives embedded in these traditions can highlight the complexity of the issue. Moreover, this also leads us to the conclusion that one cannot adopt unitary narratives in the account of contemporary cultural events and cultural experience. The way forward is to engage with explanations in different disciplines and their underlying ideologies, while also examining their relation with relatively separate but changes avenues of culture in more or less commercial forms. In contemporary society, conventional conceptions of culture still exist, e.g. in urban micro-scenes and arts festivals, but there are also a growing number of cultural events in the avenues of consumer culture and corporate culture. Furthermore, cultural events constitute spaces between civic society and consumer society, and they often also involve public institutions. The role of events as spaces in-between is fascinating, but it also poses a challenge to scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers in the field, but it becomes harder to clarify the interests and values. How, for instance, can the cultural department of a state or city government decide whether to support a cultural event that might serve cultural and civic values, but at the same time is corporately sponsored and draws people into a cultural sphere outside the political sphere? A festival, for instance, can advocate philanthropic causes but in the process de-politicize those issues by reframing them as philanthropic and not political. And how are attitudes to politics changing when social issues are presented as part of the festival experience? These questions are not only of interest to social scientists and public institutions, but also to event managers collaborating with public institutions and volunteers. They are

21 relevant to everyone concerned with issues of citizenship.

The blurring of boundaries between spheres was central to our theorization of new media practices and how they are transforming cultural events. The deep transformations in media culture involve more hybrid social experiences that are produced in their local context of origin and consumed in a parallel array of mediated communications, interactions, and representations. New media platforms and practices are redefining the very definition of eventfulness and the spatial and social boundaries of event genres. Media are no longer entering the event production and consumption after the event. Instead, they are integrated throughout the entire process, shaping the creative ideas and management of the event from the very beginning. This is illustrated by the fact that some events are produced to provide media content in global social media for branding purposes. With more media practices embedded in events, the boundaries of the extraordinary shared experience that were once defined by the interruption of daily life and the monopoly of broadcasting are now eroding. The event is now being redefined by qualities that blend the power of collective mediated experiences, with more intimate and personal experiences. The social experience of cultural events is therefore also a mediated experience. This presents new challenges and opportunities for the study of cultural events and for professionals in the industry. We have pointed to key aspects and emphasized that the analytical mode can productively shift from investigating individual aspects of how events are ascribed meaning in the media to an investigation of how events are constructed through layered media practices that changes perceptions of space, mobility, and cultural experience.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express special gratitude to the editors of this volume. We would also to thank our colleagues in the research group Innovation in Service and Experience at the University of Roskilde for inspiration. We are grateful for comments on an earlier draft of this paper at a conference on experience economy in Roskilde in June 2012.

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Notes
1

The term refers to the increasing number of cultural events, but it also variously refers to

cultural and spatial transformations such as 1) the increasing use of urban public spaces for cultural events; 2) the use of cultural events and particularly popular culture for promoting social and economic agendas; 3) the popularization of culture from arts scenes for reaching broader non-specialist audiences and media, 4) the growing power of public presence in a media-intense culture at the cost of attention to substance and long-term values; 5) the carnivalization of cultural performances in the form of spectacular show effects, choreography, and installations. The term festivalization has been used for such broad a complex developments that they might not be adequately represented by this term
2

The influential book Media Events (Dayan and Katz 1992) helped kickstart interest in media

events and issues of liveness in media experience within media studies, with important contributions being a special issue on liveness in the Journal of Communication Studies (2004) and the edited volume Media Events in a Global Age (2010), both edited and with important contributions by Nick Couldry.

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