A Word on the Art Festival

Let’s face it, festival time is a total nightmare for everyone. Stop pretending you’ll comprehensively see everything like you never managed to do the past five years you made the same promise to yourself. And if you’re a mad pervert who digs every one of the arts then you might as well quietly slip off to some secluded cultural backwater and sit this one out, or face dissolving into a puddle of over-stimulated jelly. Festival time is to the art lover what a punch in the baws is to foreplay.

Just relax. You’ll no way see everything, and you probably don’t want to anyway. Think tactically and take out the big boys first. Richard Wright’s new wall painting in the west stairwell of the Dean Gallery is an awe-inspiring must-see. Using a repeated floral motif, Wright produces a context-considerate work that well messes with your eyes.

Next up is the much anticipated show by Martin Creed at the Fruitmarket Gallery. He’s basically the funniest man in the art world and pulls it off with epic aplomb. He’s unique simply because no-one else possesses the same bold mixture of audacity and humour as he. And don’t be fooled, these works might appear subtle at first, but they are in every way brash and daring.

And if you’re not feeling too baffled by Creed’s celebration of the banal then head along to the City Observatory to see Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth’s commission, Staged. What the installation entails is anyone’s guess but will include pre-recorded CCTV footage, turning festival goers into unwitting participants.

Way out in the sticks at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop will be MAGAZINE 10, consisting of three solo shows run back to back and including Katie Orton, Paul Rooney and Kate V. Robertson. All three will have spent the previous three months preparing for this as part of a residency at ESW. One only assumes that’s long enough to make some breathtaking work. So no pressure.

Now, seeing as you can probably do all of that in one day you might as well get in amongst what else the city has to offer during this frenzied month. Go on, drive yourself into the ground in a vain attempt to gorge yourself on culture. Pure out of your mind on paintings and that.