Building cultural capital: Transforming the South African National Arts Festival

This paper looks at the role of the National Arts Festival in the socio-political transformation of South Africa from 1974 to the present. It suggests that decisions about varying the attributes of the festival in order to promote its role as a builder of new cultural capital can be aided by using a choice experiment (also called conjoint analysis). This methodology allows one to examine the relative utility levels of different aspects of the festival, their marginal rate of substitution and the market acceptability of making changes, to audiences with different racial, educational and wealth characteristics. For example, attribute trade-offs show that increasing the number of art exhibitions and the size of the craft market would increase the welfare of African-origin festival goers, but that Fringe shows are more important to European-origin people.