Festival chief faces some home truths

Edinburgh was favoured for several reasons. By and large, it had been unblighted by war and its infrastructure did not require immediate attention. Moreover, it was a small city which you could navigate on foot. And then there was its location, surrounded by hills and sea and with a castle in its midst that made you lift your eyes to the sky, as if in expectation of a heavenly entrance. It was like the backdrop to a Wagner opera. As the critic Kenneth Tynan once remarked: "It would take a Daumier to do this city justice."

Like his so many successors, the latest of whom – Irishman Fergus Linehan – was unveiled this week, Bing's knowledge of the culture of Edinburgh in particular and Scotland in general was scant. Not for nothing was the festival's name tilted toward the adjective "international". Writing about the second festival in 1948, Tynan recalled seeing the Marx Brothers' movie A Day at the Races and an English ballet, a Hungarian quartet and a Bonnard-Vuillard exhibition. The sole Scottish show he witnessed was Sir David Lindsay's The Three Estates, which he loved for its "virile cast" and "hectically good production".

Nor has much changed down the decades. On the contrary, Edinburgh was routinely portrayed as an essentially philistine and joyless village which by some astonishing good fortune just happened to be the host of the world's biggest and best arts festival. It was de rigueur for each festival director to moan about lack of funds and the ingratitude of the natives whose supposed reaction to the annual influx of culture vultures was to rent their flats for exorbitant sums and disappear to Oban for the duration.

Doubtless there was some truth amidst the scuttlebutt. But what was rarely acknowledged was the receptiveness and extraordinary hospitality of Edinburghers who tolerated such slights with patient silence and an innate sense of superiority. Every now and then demands for more cash were made on the basis that if Edinburgh did not protect its greatest asset it would be usurped by Manchester or Belfast or Stavanger, anywhere, in fact, that could only be reached via Ryanair. But while virtually every city worthy of the name now has its festival none compares with Edinburgh's. Long past pensionable age, it brushes off rivals as a rhino does fleas.

This, then, is the history which Mr Linehan is so pleased to inherit. He has spent a decade running a festival in Sydney, one of the many places on the planet one wouldn't mind visiting if one could come back the same day. More importantly, he has been a regular attender at the Edinburgh Festival and appears to have a genuine affection for it. That is a relief. It is also cheering to know that he is open to new ideas and adept at balancing books. Music appears to be a particular love. According to one report he tweets in praise of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and recently "scored a coup" in persuading Kraftwerk, a group of robotic German musicians, to perform their entire back catalogue.

What is unclear, however, is what he knows of Scottish art and culture and what space he will be inclined to offer it in future programmes. Of late, these have been conspicuous by their absence or marginalisation. For example, in one recent programme there was no mention of anything Scottish until page 27.

This tokenism has gone on for so long that those in what we must today term the cultural sector do not think it worthy of comment. Which is curious but not untypical of the malaise that pervades our arts administrators for whom Scottishness seems to be synonymous with the local or the second-rate. Yet isn't all great art, in whatever form it is expressed, be it Noh theatre, the Bayeux tapestry or piobaireachd, parochial at root?