The 2018 Music Festival season is almost over, and the pattern of “experience” is all over the place. To be honest, I can’t hear the word “experience” anymore. Because most of them are fake, or fantasy at best.

Tomorrowland 2018 Aftermovie

Whether you look at videos from the Dimitri Vegas World Madness Tour, the Alcatraz Hard Rock & Metal Festival, or the Tomorrowland 2018 aftermovie (with almost 3 Million views!), it is all the same: the Disneyland-for-adults-landscape-escapes, the rude language, the circus artists, the booze, the drugs, and the illusion of beautiful people only (except Alcatraz) horrify me. And now there is bigger than big, the Sziget Festival in Hungary. Check-out the photo tab on their site. And then there is lower than low: the Belgian Camping Kitch Festival with this year’s them “Your Marginal Alter-Ego” (parental advice). All of the same decadence at scale.

And it starts dripping over into the corporate event scene. Have a look at the Event Manager Blog: plenty of ideas to make a great event.

Dimitri Vegas may be born in Willebroek (Antwerp, Belgium) but he could as well be originating from Las Vegas. This Las Vegas style/experience was also showing into this year’s Money2020Europe event (they started their event-as-a-business in Las Vegas anyway 😉

And it’s all about scale: 5,000 people, 10,000 people, 100,000 people, … labelled as event-as-experience but deep inside as event-as-a-money-business. We have lost all sense of intimacy.

Besides the enormous challenge and expense of crowd control, these are super expensive productions, just to create fake, to escape from reality into fake nature, fake fountains, with rosy girls with flower in their hairs, hands forming loving hearts, glitter, fake smoke, huge fireworks, confetti machines, heat, sweat, groping, etc.

It feels like the New-Orleans Bourbon Street vulgarity becomes the new norm. You know the norms when somebody calls you a dog.

Picture from Bestival (sic) 2018 – via The Guardian

Fake-ness has of course for long already permeated news and corporate communications talk, and has now also invaded fake scientific reports, fake reviews, fake attention, many of them algorithmically organised by robots.We are now all part of the New Dark Age that is so well described in James Bridles highly recommended latest book.

And it feels the fantasies become bigger and more fantastic the more reality fails at fulfilling the needs. Fantasy compromises on real fulfilment of real needs. The more the audience’s reality is distorted, the more they find comfort in fantasy experiences.

Fake trumps reality.

Nobody seems interested anymore in authentic décor, grace, purity of mind and body, with an intention to create wonder for their guests. Or are there still folks out there, who look for being dipped in a silver cleaner, and rediscover their bright shininess, the newness under the accretions of time, habit and fantasy?

My cousin recently reported from his vacation in the Austrian forests and nailed it:

“What people are looking for artificially is always present there naturally”.

BTW, how was your holiday ? 😉