Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 150

first, direct engagement across communities helps to question biases about
the refugee communities and bridge cultural divides. Second, fund-raising
through participatory projects addresses a pragmatic and immediate need
for both material support for refugee communities and the necessity to
welcome immigrants and facilitate their integration in the labor force and
everyday life in Europe.
Culture War as an Intellectual Project
The Edinburgh Festival is the materialization of an inherently paradoxical
intellectual project—it is at the same time the embodiment of European
unity and the locus of a clash between two opposing views of art. Fueled by
the anxieties of the post-war Europe and motivated by the drive to recover
a renewed sense of shared cultural values, the Festival represented “a means
of spiritual refreshment, a way of reasserting moral values, of building
relationships between nations, of shoring up European civilization and of
providing ‘welfare’ in its broadest sense” (Bartie ����:�). The Festival is the
exemplar of a cultural product that was created at a particular junction of
art and politics in in European history. As the political context changed, and
the means of artistic expression became more sophisticated and developed
to incorporate more technology, the Festival adapted to make room for new
types of cultural performances. These values transformed throughout the
decades to follow, causing new cultural wars that reflected changes in social
and political contexts at the national and international levels.
The initial project sought to unify Europe after the war through creating
an international event that brings together prestigious performance artists.
Yet the very creation of the Festival marked also a division within the arts as
forms of social practice.
The culture war embedded in the Edinburgh Festival is visible in the contrast
between the co-existing International Festival and the Fringe. In other words,
two events are two types of cultural products, which are co-constitutive to
some extent, that materialize the debate between “high art” and “low art.”
The distinction between these two broad categories of art is ambiguous and
often contested. John Fisher wrote a genealogy of the conceptual dichotomy
and sought to explicate the cultural hierarchies assumed in this distinction.
He identifies several overlapping but different distinctions that can underlie
ordinary uses of “high art” and “low art.” One is the distinction between two
classes of media or of art forms, such as between oil painting and television
(media) or abstract paintings and television situation comedies (forms)
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