Land of Festivals

By Lee In-gweon

Around the season of spring and autumn in Korea, a myriad of abundant festivals are taking place featuring all kinds of themes, with some overlapping with each other in content and timing.

Festivals are not only meaningful but also seminal in various ways: branding the places of the festivals, pulling together citizens in a unity, and further revving up the local economy.

The majority of festivals cannot help receiving funds from local governments, because the festivities can hardly finance themselves. Therefore, they are always placed under close scrutiny from the community for economic efficiency and their potential for regional promotion.

Even though we need to approach a festival from a long-term perspective in a strategic manner, impatience and shortsightedness always keep people from looking on the bright side of the hard nuts to crack.

As a matter of fact, pulling off a fruitful regional feast is admittedly not an easy task, particularly in Korea, which has a long-missed cultural mindset and arts advocacy. Cultural awareness doesn't permeate the whole of society in this nation, unlike advanced countries where the cultural arts have become the integral part of national life. People in such culturally high-level nations where festivals thrive have more natural fondness for appreciating culture and arts compared with most of us Koreans who tend to be engrossed in more down-to-earth matters.

In many cases, regional festivals in Korea are culinarily oriented, rather than culturally tinted, with more folks packing food stalls and playgrounds. Scrumptious foods are an important feature of attracting a big turnout for a festival. Usually, the number of people visiting a festival is the yardstick of its success, and so the participation is sometimes inflated to meet the demands of the fund providers.

We all know there has been a public cry calling for revamping the whole swathe of local festivals that have popped up. Korean festivals have kept growing in number despite overall doubts about their effectiveness and usefulness. In Korea, where a local autonomy system has yet to take a firm root, elected chiefs of local governments have resorted to holding festivals as a means of showing off their presence and boosting their populist appeal. So it makes it hard for them to discontinue valueless, money-losing festivals, in which the local chapter of major political parties are involved.

Against such a backdrop, the government reportedly started to overhaul regional festivals by using its financial subsidies as a leverage. It has hinted at making careful assessments to phase out problematic festivals and focus its support to exemplary ones. In the same vein, the government has selected model festivals by rating them, based on which it has allocated financial support.

People seem to think more is better in festival-making, as long as these festivals are differently programmed from each other. In fact, Korea lags far behind the United States, Japan and European countries even in the number of festivals held each year. But a wide variety of their fetes, whether they are related with arts or lifestyle, have mostly built on strong traditions to justify their own places in their respective communities. That is, the social ambience is well suited to making good festivals.

Particularly in the United States, there are numerous models of success. Like the arts in general, funding a festival may require both government backing and support from individual benefactors. It is hoped that over time the proportion of funds coming from government subsidies will be reduced and corporate donations ― in the form of sponsorship and philanthropy ― will increase along with box office income.

Korean festival organizers need to learn the paradigm pursued by their U.S. counterparts, because they still have a long way to go before they are able to catch up with the advanced nation. Anyway, whether the rationale is financial, cultural, philanthropic, or a little of each, every festival-hosting region in this country needs to develop sufficient rationale to do so.

The writer is CEO of Sori Arts Center in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province, and has been active in managerial and executive positions in various cultural arts environments. He can be reached at leeingweon@hanmail.net.

[출처 : 코리아타임스]