‘From mosh pit to posh pit’: Festival imagery in the context of the boutique festival

Abstract

This paper addresses market-based cultural production in the context of the UK festival field, with a focus on the framing of the festival experience through anticipation. In particular, boutique festivals are discussed as examples of a contemporary cultural ‘product category’ which has emerged and proliferated in the last decade. Through discourse analysis of media representations of boutique festivals, we situate the boutique festival in a broader sociocultural discourse of agency and choice, which makes it meaningful and desirable, and outline the type of consumer it is meant to attract. For the contemporary consumer, the boutique festival is presented as an anticipated experience based on countercultural festival imagery, while simultaneously framing cultural participation through consumption. The paper contributes to a wider debate on the construction of the consumer in the cultural economy.

Keywords:

• cultural production
• anticipation
• aesthetic experiences
• boutique festivals
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It can be said that all festivals include a degree of commercialization, for example, related to ticket and other sales, but descriptions of the boutique festival, to varying degrees, frame it in terms of non-commercialism.

2. Size definitions range between 2000–5000 (Croughton 2008) and 10,000–20,000 participants (Masson 2011).

3. The hotlist constituted the only item found in the database for 2003, while the peak occurred in 2008.