What We Can Learn From the Poster Competition
With all the impressions that pour in from outside at the Wiesn, we must not forget what the Oktoberfest is and what not.
The public vote to determine the 30 most popular Oktoberfest poster designs ended on Sunday. Next, a jury will select the three winning designs, the first-placed of which will decorate the official beer mug and numerous other logo items in 2025. Below, you can see the most popular design from our own vote on Facebook. Even though it's unlikely to win the official competition, the design with the dancing couple is a good example of why a selection by a jury of experts makes perfect sense.
We understand that the pleasing choice of colors behind a dapper pair of dancers can be appealing at first glance. However, anyone who is a bit familiar with the Oktoberfest should notice, at the very least at a second glance, that the church towers in the background are neither reminiscent of Munich, nor is it properly done, suggesting that generative AI was involved. The circus tents in front of it suggest that the author has confused the Oktoberfest with Wintertollwood.
When something radiates as far as the Wiesn, the images it sends out into the distance are condensed into clichés and at some point played back again. Therefore, for years now, beer mugs raising has been a staple at foreign events that unfortunately were named Oktoberfest, beer chugging has been glorified as a cultural asset and green cloth pants have been worn with Peter Pan hats to honor the Bavar..., well something. Social networks have massively amplified this effect in recent years. When Instagrammers with a big followership confuse the Oktoberfest with midsummer, this has such an impact that within a few years, flower arrangements in the hair are misinterpreted as part of traditional Bavarian tracht, to the point where a company as culturally uninterested as Paulaner even temporarily prints them on its Oktoberfest beer labels.
AI image generators are just beginning to amplify this effect even further. It will therefore be all the more important that the key players at the Wiesn understand the Oktoberfest so that it is not left to arbitrary decisions by others. Undesirable developments such as the installation of video walls at the entrance to Oide Wiesn last year may be dismissed as a triviality. However, aesthetic and programmatic missteps ultimately add up to an overall picture that makes it difficult to explain to outsiders why there is more to the Oktoberfest, originally conceived as the Bavarian national festival, than a playground for drinking tourists.