Downtown Cairo, the longtime hub of the city’s bookstores, art galleries, music venues, and cafés, became the focal site of political art and protest performance in 2011 and 2012. At this time, an Egyptian cultural operator capitalized on the renewed attention local arts were receiving internationally, and founded the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF), including plays, concerts, and art exhibits by both Egyptian and visiting European artists. This paper analyzes the festivalization in D-CAF of downtown as an arts destination, where it had been an arts milieu. Inviting foreign performers to participate was one means of festivalizing the urban space as a stage. Moreover, D-CAF sold mid-priced tickets for performances (in contrast to the free monthly arts festival al-fann midan) and emphasized high production values, departing from the reputation of downtown’s arts venues as places for amateurs and rising artists. Thus, the festival invested in art, theatre, and music, as cultural products to be appreciated independently of social and political context. D-CAF’s website stated that the festival aimed to attract culturally sophisticated audiences from around the world, in addition to Egyptian audiences who might not otherwise frequent avant-gardist and low-budget arts offerings downtown. What were the implications of arts tourism for downtown’s economy, struggling from a loss of tourist dollars since the revolution? And how did festivalization reorient the practice of art and cultural production for Egyptian participants in D-CAF? This paper will be based on field research at the second edition of D-CAF, in April 2013, as well as textual research and interviews on the inaugural festival in 2012. A working hypothesis is that the festival’s spotlight on downtown as cosmopolitan, creative space (echoing Egyptian literary works, e.g. The Yacoubian Building) sidelines the use of arts in political struggle and represents them instead as means of rising above national identity politics toward global values, thus inviting local and foreign visitors to celebrate the creativity of contemporary artists as part of a cultural heritage. At a time when Egyptian artists feared the imposition of constraints upon their work by Islamist politicians, the festival was part of a range of efforts to elevate art above politics.