Events, my dear boy, events
The real story behind the scenes of an arts festival or awards ceremony
Zadie Smith, in her sympathetic and inevitably empathetic review of the film Tár, classes Cate Blanchett’s title character as a (fellow) ‘Cultural Luminary’. This class, it’d seem, have it great; Smith writes:
Cultural Luminaries make a lot of money. Their imperious attitudes and witty bons mots are in demand everywhere [and delight] the grey-haired festival goers.
What about the festival workers though? What’s it like to attend not the awards ceremony so much as the Cultural Luminary him or herself, escort them from hired car to backstage, wait on their dietary quibbles, screen their mingling? What’s it like doing the weeks of work that set up the Cultural Luminary for all their witty bons mots?
You start via email with an agony of over-polite scheduling: cancellations and suspected counter-cancellations, till your boss, at first indulgent of every change, goes quiet on the thread and asks to be switched from Cc to Bcc. On a private thread with your counterpart subaltern, you swap emails ending in a frustrated but amused ‘dammit!’ or a flat ‘lol’ or ‘ARGH! All the best.’ The PA confides in you the Cultural Luminary is threatening to postpone as they’ll be entering the wilderness of another project soon. A date materialises.
Hence you might think that, from the events manager down to the festival skivvy, facilitating a Cultural Luminary has to have something dogsbodyish about it. But at least on the day itself you work as a pack for the most part. Serving others, especially The Great Washed, brings you, the behind-the-scenes staff, closer together. As well as the solidarity of your low status, there’s the way these events’ surreality makes you all a bit giddy. A supposed perk of the job is getting to sit in on the Cultural Luminary’s interview or speech; but how much better a speech sounds through the shut doors of a foyer, like a play you’re relieved has gotten off to a good start so now can be left unattended. The real action is off-stage, the whispering and trying not to laugh too loud that it’ll undercut the amplified bons mots in the auditorium. You stumble across your busy colleagues at the deserted front-of-house only to commiserate and gossip. Stairwells that aren’t empty so much as emptied are all the more charged with excitement for it. Romances are often in the offing. Telling jokes about the Cultural Luminary which get you a smirking shake of the head and gentle shoulder charge or hip bump.
There’s sometimes even a kind of lanyard glamour to the work. You wave yourself in, marching past the early-bird punters - those conscientious and vague elderly couples - then down the glam art-space’s drab, staff-only corridors, to confer with catering or the AV department, at once subservient and authoritative, like a maitre-d. You’re toting on your shoulder, like a builder with a hod or a cameraman with a tripod, a long zipped bag with a satchel strap, the kind that might sheath a yoga mat. But from it you remove what looks like a hibernating tube light. With a seatbelt whirr you pull out a length of canvas, the photo print material glinting its scales, then slot a telescope pole into the metal hem at the top, the other end into a hole at the bottom, and so keep unfurled and upright the banner at one side of the stage, with its logo of your culture organisation or a photo of the Cultural Luminary. (Chin on fist and quote about the power of art.)
In a previous newsletter I wrote about these people going from 2 to 3-D. It’s not uncanny, exactly, meeting a Cultural Luminary; the uncanny (for Freud) is when objects seem to have agency or animation you know shouldn’t, like waxworks or dolls. Cultural Luminaries aren’t inanimate, not at that point in the evening anyway, but the feeling they give off is still a species of the uncanny, maybe the inverted uncanny. You know they’re real people but they seem like animated dolls. Seeing one for real - fetching them water, ferrying them in the lift - is like seeing a friend you haven’t for years, and they look grainier and fuzzier than you remember, but then your memory and reality transpose, and the person looks simultaneously like they always did and like they do now for the first time.
The eerie aura around the Cultural Luminary might simply be the crackle of their own nerves. Their small talk with you is condescending by default: as egalitarian as their native impulse, it can’t help skew from the situation’s imbalance; after all, you’re not even a guest—you’re there to work, indirectly for them. One set of Cultural Luminaries enjoy that fact, like the businessman who gets his shoes shined not because it’s more convenient but because he wants to sit on a sort of throne while a man on his knees caresses his feet. This set looks right through you. Another set sees through you; they act with a learned paranoia around events staff. Oh you might seem like a professional, but any moment now you’re gonna try hustle them with a careerist request or play out one of your fanboy fantasies. A star being around the starstruck must feel like they’re at the centre of a prank that’s never revealed.
It’s better for them if the starstruck are in navigable groups. Moving through the VIP area or green room, the Cultural Luminary clumps people towards them like static electricity dust. There are the over-familiar friends, who knew them before they were luminous, going in for the back slap or air kiss. And the cultural middle-women and -men, who have enough cultural cachet of their own to risk a handshake and some Dutch-encouraged chat. You have to wonder whether your trustees are in it for these meet-and-greets; when the board meets they aren’t so easily pleased.
If the event gives way to a private event, you might catch a glance of the ‘Hollyoaks After Dark’ version of the Cultural Luminary. This mainly means watching them bitch about other Luminaries and get rosy drunk. Not on your ordinary arts event plonk either. Gone are the bowls of crisps whose claim to haute cuisine is they’re made up of different flavours mixed together. Now there are deluxe sandwiches that come on chilled platters, that need peeling apart like orange segments, so many there’ll be a surplus at the end of the night, the dried-out bread sandpapered on top. Instead of giving them a good home, you might tag along to the restaurant where the Cultural Luminary is wined and dined and shaken down. Don’t worry about any awkwardness; the Cultural Luminary will be buffered by a praetorian guard of lackeys and trustees, while you and your pals sit the other end of the table overindulging on the elite scran. After the Cultural Luminary heads off / gets pivoted into the back of cab, there’s a general decompression. Even at their most common-touching, the Cultural Luminary, their presence, will have been oppressive - how can it not be? - that’s the limit and the price of fame. Then your bosses head off too, and you’re left to settle the bill on the company card, with, if you’re lucky, a blind eye from on high to treat yourself before you go. Low light, bleary sight, a 1am finish, earning you, whether sanctioned or not, a late morning dribble back into the office.
At one event with a high-watt Cultural Luminary, the post-ceremony dinner was served on a grand mezzanine used in the daytime for meetings and conferences, but now magically transformed, Night at the Museum-style, into a fin-de-siècle restaurant. It had a table going spare, a blemish in its overall portrait of café society hubbub—room enough for some of the sore-footed staff to join the grown-ups.
We’d only just sat down when a PA bumped us for some of the Cultural Luminary’s last-minute arrivals. The venue staff eased us out, through a dark door, then seated us at a fast-unfolded and white-clothed table, dwarfed in the middle of an empty office. And then this literal sideline and downgrade turned into an impromptu late-night supper for me, you and your boyfriend, consisting of what catering could save us from the kitchen, but said leftovers better than what we’d eat without work subsidising it: actual courses, novel vegetables, tiny desserts on giant plates like haikus surrounded by page margins. While your boyfriend dropped some home truths about the quality of the produce, you looked so tired and beautiful, the eco motion-sensing lights blinking on and off behind you, the clink and murmur from the mezzanine like the invigilated eating of a school hall while our own get-together was a side-room secret.
Because who are the ones having a good time at these things, really? The Cultural Luminary? It might seem like a dream come true, the childish dream of being at the centre of attention. But look more closely: it’s a birthday and a wedding’s worth of spotlight without any of the ritual outlet to sublimate the embarrassment. A Cultural Luminary can be defined as someone who’d have to actively try to be left alone. The spotlight forces from them new gradations of false smiles. Zadie Smith again:
During the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is stiff and self-conscious—actorly, even. As Gopnik recounts Tár’s many achievements, her face remains fixed in its pose of false humility, and when she speaks, she offers her audience a series of eloquent but overly rehearsed bons mots… But Blanchett has it exactly right. She is doing what the talent is always doing at these things: acting.
Gopnik aside, the Cultural Luminary makes those near them false and theatrical too. A Cultural Luminary is a gravity well, a distortion field, a lens bulge on the glass of their surroundings. No one knows how to act around them so everyone acts. The Cultural Luminaries even make moons of their spouses, whether they like it or not, whatever that person’s own accomplishments, since the focus of everyone else at these events puts them in a satellite position.
I don’t want to get all Hegel master/slave about this, the indolent master whose spirit goes flabby while the slave gets to forge his by constantly having to apply will to matter. I don’t think the valets at the Oscars or the living mannequins hired to keep the seats looking full for TV while the celebs are in the loo or out having a cig are enjoying themselves more than those same luxuriously trollied celebs. And you have to control for whether you do this job every day and for what size of event. For full-time event managers, catering staff and tech-crews the job is tiring and tiresome. (It’s like those sleepy attendants at old opera houses who’d have to keep getting out of their chairs to open and close doors so high society lovers could have their trysts.)
For the rest of us, though, there’s profit to be had beyond your unovertimed wage: the camaraderie, the weird social vectors forcing new discoveries and details, and ones which have zilch do with the Cultural Luminary or what their event is about - their speech, their award - or with the gauche contact-high of celeb proximity. When the taxi door muffles them shut inside (the reverse of ears popping on a plane) when they’re on their pram drive home, isn’t the Cultural Luminary glad it’s over? That they can drop the act? Theirs is the falseness, ours is the real.