“Culture” killed the festival star

Flinders Station illuminated for White Night.

What’s in a name? Apparently, a lot.

At least this is the sentiment of a recent panel at the TTF conference, who largely agreed that slapping an event with the ‘culture’ sticker was taking away some of its sweet smell.

Despite being a cultural event, Vivid is not specifically marketed with the ‘cultural’ label, and Sydney Opera House’s CEO Louise Herron thinks this is a key secret to the event’s triumph.

“The strength of Vivid is that people don’t think of it as a cultural event, it’s just an event, and not attaching this label to it enhances its popularity,” Herron said.

“Putting culture to things acts as a barrier,” she added, suggesting that people don’t call Sydney Opera House a cultural institution because it’s already implicit, and could otherwise isolate certain audiences.

But does this mean that culture acts as a barrier to the accessibility and success of an event?

Sydney Parklands and Botanic Gardens’ executive director Kim Ellis suggested that attaching a ‘cultural’ tag to an event can make it feel elitist and exclusive.

“Once you attach culture to it, you struggle to get people from the outskirts of Sydney to come into city for something that is marketed as culture,” he said.

Rather than arguing about whether something should or shouldn’t be labelled as cultural, a more cohesive approach to cultural events in Australia was pinned as integral to building Aussie tourism.

“We could waste time arguing about the culture label, but at the heart of success is collaboration,” Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s chief executive John Kotzas said.

“We should be working with other facilities to give visitors a different perception of the city, and re-brand the city as cohesive.”

Museum Victoria’s chief executive officer Dr Patrick Greene cited Melbourne as a city that is winning in this field.

“People have told me that in Melbourne, whatever the event is, however obscure it is, you will draw an audience because people can get in and people can get out,” Greene said.

“This is lacking in other parts of Australia.”

The key factor to climbing the tourism ladder in terms of cultural prowess, then, lies in Australia’s ability to stitch together the visitor experience.

And then there’s something known as the TripAdvisor Effect, which Ellis said can make or break the review of an experience.

“The rating of the whole experience gets dropped because someone had a great time at Botanic Gardens but the toilet was dirty or they couldn’t find a bus home, and this drags ratings down,” Ellis said.

The proposed solution is to create a more unified experience for visitors down under, in everything from the airport process to the public transport systems and all the in between pieces that add to an overall event experience.

“In Australia we cannot rely on tourism to keep what we do going,” Greene said.

“A healthy visitor economy is one in which people come back, as well as coming from overseas and interstate.”

“We need to think collectively as Australia, how we see the rest of the world looking at us, and what they see, and we need to get out there and tell them about it.”

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