An arts festival is a festival that features the arts in a wide sense of the word, not just visual arts.
Arts Festivals typically feature a mixed programme that might include music, literature, comedy, children's entertainment, science, street theatre etc. and are presented most usually in venues over a period of time ranging from perhaps a weekend to a month. Each event within the programme will usually be separately ticketed. They are largely curated by an Artistic Director though this genre also includes Fringe Festivals which are generally open access. Arts Festivals are therefore distinctive from greenfield festivals (typically weekend camping festivals such as Glastonbury where one ticket covers all the whole programme) and Visual Arts Festivals (which concentrate on just the visual arts).
Festivals of visual arts are also not to be confused with the commercial art fair. Artists participate in the most important of such festival exhibitions by invitation, and these exhibitions (e.g. the Venice Biennale) are organised by internationally recognized curators chosen by a committee of peers. These international exhibitions must also be distinguished from art fairs, market-oriented gatherings of art dealers and their wares, which have recently emerged as among the most important art-world venues for promoting artists and sales of contemporary art in the present-day super-heated art market.
History[edit]
Probably the two oldest arts festivals are in England. The Three Choirs Festival in the West of England was established as a "yearly musical assembly" by 1719.[1] The other is the Norfolk and Norwich Festival which first took place in 1772.[2] The largest arts festival in England today is the Brighton Festival Fringe.
Leading arts festivals include the Edinburgh Festival in Edinburgh, Adelaide Festival of Arts in Adelaide, the Biennale of Sydney, Festival d'Avignon in Avignon, France,[3] and Tongyeong International Music Festival in Tongyeong, Korea and Sanskruti Arts Festival, Upvan, India. One-off arts festivals have included the Liverpool08 European Capital of Culture in 2008. To find out more about UK arts festivals visit the British Arts Festivals Association website www.artsfestivals.co.uk and for European Festivals - the European Festivals Association.
References[edit]
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