Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 29

buy for $���. The writer, Emily Witt, concluded a somewhat depressing
account of her experience like this:
“No wonder people hate Burning Man, I thought, when I pictured it
as a cynic might: rich people on vacation breaking rules that everyone
else would be made to suffer for not obeying. Many of these people
would go back to their lives and back to work on the great farces of
our age. They wouldn’t argue for the decriminalisation of the drugs
they had used; they wouldn’t want anyone to know about their time
in the orgy dome.”
Not every festival is as extreme as Burning Man - there is as yet no “orgy
dome” in Edinburgh; although the Fringe needs its annual dose of scandal,
so you never know. But the idea of insiders temporarily pretending to be
outsiders—risk-takers, bohemians, and avant-gardists—before going back to
propping up the machinery of the establishment is relevant to all cultural
pursuits that claim or strive to be inclusive. The fact that the impact or
function of a piece of art is near-impossible to quantify is a dilemma known
to anyone who’s ever had to fill out funding applications or identify key
performance objectives, but it’s all the more significant in times when cuts
to the arts are deeper than ever before and fault lines between cultural elites
and “ordinary working people” are ever more useful to politicians seeking to
justify those cuts.
In Edinburgh, that insider–outsider status is yet more complicated because
of an ambiguity regarding the extent to which Edinburgh as a festival city
actually belongs to Scotland as a nation. The Edinburgh festivals are widely
and justly celebrated, but they have also, for the past �� years, plied their
trade against a not inconsiderable degree of local skepticism. There is no
more guaranteed big laugh in any film set in Scotland than the one that
greets the sequence in Trainspotting in which the main characters set upon
and rob an American tourist in Edinburgh for the Festival. Naturally there’s
a class component to that scene in which reverse snobbery says that art and
culture are inherently elitist and suspect. There is also the mild contempt
felt by anyone who lives in a tourist destination and must endure the mass
of people who descend annually in order to stand on the street in clumps
pointing at things and declaring how quaint they are. But there’s also the
underlying truth that the festivals in Edinburgh, ingrained as they are now
into Scotland’s cultural landscape and ecology, did not emerge organically
out of its indigenous culture. They were brought in from the outside.
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