Edinburgh in August is an amazing place. You could fill multiple lives with the cultural events that burst out of every venue in the city. The fringe programme alone resembles a telephone directory before the internet shrank them: 450 close-printed pages. Then there is the international festival, the international book festival, the art festival… Everything high and low, sublime and absurd, avant garde and traditional is here: Schubert’s Trout Quintet played by soloists of the Berliner Philharmoniker; Pussy Riot; Nicola Sturgeon interviewing Ali Smith about her novels; a night at the Leith theatre with the Scottish band Lau; Akram Khan’s final solo dance piece; standup comedy until you are tired of laughing. The festivals always act as a barometer to contemporary preoccupations: this year masculinity has been explored in multiple works, from Adam Lazarus’s disturbing monologue Daughter, and David Ireland’s uncomfortably hilarious Ulster American, to Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch’s examination of intimacy, Maladie de la Mort.
Amid all of this there are free events to be found – the Fruitmarket Gallery’s quietly profound Tacita Dean exhibition, for example – while the book festival and international festival both have extensive schools and outreach programmes. But for many, both locals and would-be visitors, the festivals represent not so much a joyous overabundance of culture as a costly impossibility. There is also scandalous lack of provision for disabled visitors, notably from the larger commercial promoters at the fringe – giving the strong impression that some organisations are content to put profits above people. The city comes under huge pressure during August: there are crowded streets, innumerable tour buses, and a city centre that can feel hollowed out by Airbnb lettings and more and more new luxury hotels. Some residents fear that the city is becoming overwhelmed and unliveable.
Meantime, the festivals themselves are caught in the curious trap of endless expansionism: the notion that each year’s ought somehow to be bigger than the last, that increased ticket sales and more visitors are necessarily and unquestioningly to be celebrated.
That connects with a wider obsession in the arts, not least the publicly funded arts. Cultural organisations supported by the taxpayer have an obvious duty to the public, and the easiest way to assess their impact on their communities is through visitor or audience numbers . And yet that is not the only way, or even the best way. Millions flooding through the doors of Tate Modern each year is not the same as millions encountering art in a substantial, meaningful way. In the same way, an endlessly expanding cultural offer in Edinburgh in August does not mean an endlessly better one.
There is a balance to be struck, both by the way the festivals are judged to have succeeded and in the way in which Edinburgh’s council makes provision for its citizens and its visitors. That involves listening to residents and visitors alike – and bringing a dash of care and thoughtfulness to the wonderful anarchy that is Edinburgh in August.
