‘What the hell is water?’ : The arts festival and the free market

In this conversation, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Rainer Hofmann address the role of performing arts festivals in a neoliberal context. Hofmann is the artistic director of SPRING Performing Arts Festival in Utrecht, and the conversation takes place during the festival’s 2017 edition. Hofmann and Groot Nibbelink discuss how art critically responds to the ideology of the free market; how festivals also need to operate within a neoliberal context; meanwhile observing that an economy-driven society is deeply entangled with wider societal phenomena such as nationalism, populism and globalisation.