more is less part 1071

Column by Richard Thomas at The Wire online about being unsatisfied by the "the consumer feeding frenzies unleashed by music festival programmers out to fill every seat at the table":

 "The[se festivals] are predicated upon the concept of the cornucopia: an eclectic assortment of artists all in one place over one weekend....  There is no concept other than a supermarket-like offering: lots of popular products in one space.... These festivals... act as trusted cultural aggregators for fans happy to be treated as herd-like consumers getting everything on a plate in an all you can eat buffet of nothing."

 "All you can eat buffet of nothing" - sentennnnnnnnnce!

And lots more acerbic thoughts and phrasings in here (although not everyone would agree, indeed one hostile commenter calls it "a shocking hamfisted screed"! and most of those who saw fit to comment disagree with Thomas's contentions)

Such as "NCP: No Concept Programming" 

"NCP abstracts artists from any meaningful context, allowing weak or even false continuities to be established.... NCP is a cultural open prison where a false sense of unencumbered liberty is cultivated merely by dissolving the immediate signifiers of incarceration. Recently, a friend quipped that All Tomorrow's Parties reminded him of an internment camp with chalets and bands. That stretches the ATP experience into an undeservedly dark realm but one gets the idea: art and participation in art is contained and constrained by curators and organisations who profess the very opposite. To me it is clear these culture managers have swallowed the capitalist logic that true freedom can only be found in consumerism, and that one finds oneself by losing oneself in an abundance of false choices. The eclecticism and freedom that NCP attempts to evoke is a mirage that obscures the barren reality that it is homogenising, sanitised, commodified and all about profit maximisation..."
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