ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic raised many questions about the cultural sector’s ability to adapt to the disruption of cultural production and consumption. Not only did it expose the full extent of precarity that characterises labour relationships in this sector but also its surprising resilience and flexibility. But what are the trade-offs in the response to the pandemic? In this chapter, I focus on the case of a multi-genre cultural festival [fjúžn] in Bratislava and offer a detailed cultural sociological reconstruction of the responses of its organisers. Drawing on the theory of justification, I emphasise the role of moral expectations and evaluative judgements and argue that they played a crucial role in shaping decision-making that informed their response. I show that their response to the pandemic began long before festival production was affected by the pandemic in any practical terms and that they were able to respond to the pandemic creatively and in ways they found both meaningful and morally justifiable by making complex compromises. Finally, I demonstrate that their growing recognition of the innovative potential of some practices, which were born out of these compromises, is likely to change their approach to festival production in the future.
