The public space artists' paradox: Commodification of art in light festivals

Abstract

Light festivals are present today in practically all large cities on a global scale. Its intended benefits include attracting unintentional tourists (displacement effect), stimulate visitation on residents of neighbouring cities, and fomenting in-home ongoers: promoting the nowadays desired "cultural tourism" (Richards, 2017). They are also used to produce favourable narratives that contribute to city branding and positive city images (Kavaratzis, 2004). Many municipalities have adopted them as tools for creating new nocturnal economies (Garcia-Ruiz, 2019), and others have used them as part of territory recover strategies through the so-called "artwashing" (Sheldon, 2015). They could be understood as culture led initiatives for territorial development, but that's only a side of the event. These festivals -many times- end up by Disneyficating the areas in which they take place due to a perceived loss of authenticity (Sorkin, 1994; Zukin, 1995) and the intensive but ephemeral occupation of the public space often have terrible impacts. In the limited specific literature, it is often presented the institutional voice, while other actors involved tend to be overviewed. What is the artists' position on the commodification of their works and its instrumentalization for this type of urban speculation? In this paper, I will present the ethnographic work carried out between 2016 and 2019 and the results of the analysis of 32 in-depth interviews with renowned artists within the world of light festivals. Here, I will introduce the public space artists' paradox: spatial content generator, critic artist, and precarious culture worker.