FROM the outset the Edinburgh Festival, which had yet to acquire its "international" sheen, displayed an ambivalence toward the city and the country that was its host.

Invariably - and with some justification - the frowsy capital was portrayed as anti-art and antipathetical towards the jamboree that landed annually. Moreover, it was viewed in many quarters as penny-pinching and prudish, hypocritically waxing indigent about licentious­ness while raking in the cash of the lotus-eaters.

If such attitudes exist today they are few and far between. As anyone who has been in the capital this past lately can attest, it is throbbing. At the Book Festival I encountered a man from Oregon who was staying for two weeks and whose wallet wouldn't close, so stuffed was it with tickets to shows. Every year the Festival expands, like our collective waistlines.

Next year, of course, it will take place against the backdrop of the independence referendum, the date of which - September 18 - falls shortly after the Festival ends. Whatever the outcome it will be one of those few moments which justifies the tag "historic". It is just possible, I suppose, that things thereafter will remain the same but I doubt it. Whether we vote Yes or No there will be a reckoning, a repositioning, a drawing of breath. We Scots in the late autumn of 2014 will be gazing even more intently than usual at our navels.

How then does the mother ship, the Edinburgh International Festival, propose to mark this epochal occasion? Easy, says its outgoing director, Sir Jonathan Mills, by ignoring it.

Next year's festival, he says, will go big on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War and the Commonwealth Games. He is hoping - because he has no control over it - that the Fringe will take up the slack. "We would not wish our festival to be anything other than it has always been, which is a politically neutral space for artists," he says.

This statement makes one's blood boil. For a start it is typical of the modern arts administrator, whose raison d'etre is to ensure that no-one is upset or exercised at any performance. Blandness is not just the bane of the International Festival but that, too, of all its offshoots. With the odd exception, only safe targets - Ukip bampots, old Etonian Cabinet ministers, Jimmy Saville, Rangers - are tackled.

Of course, it would be ridiculous and inimical if the Festival were to programme in such a way that it was seen to be endorsing either side in the great debate. No one, other than internet fascists, wants that. What would have been good to see, however, was an indication that something momentous is about to happen and that it needs marked. What that might be cannot be beyond the collective invention of our artists. After all, under new artistic director Laurie Sansom, the National Theatre of Scotland is to tackle the independence debate head-on with two new plays that focus on the identity of Scotland and its future.

Personally, I'd love to hear James MacMillan's Symphony for Holyrood, witness a revival of The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Back Oil, view an exhibition of Henry Raeburn's portraits, hear Jean Redpath sing Burns, have a ring-side seat as James Kelman flytes with the shade of MacDiarmid, laugh at Billy Connolly until I get a stitch, feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise to the wave-like sound of a Gaelic choir.

Above all, what one wants is art that matters and is memorable and is not simply, as so many in power would like it to be, a money-grabber into which resources are put only if a return can be guaranteed and the economy can be seen to benefit.

But let's go back, to 1948, to the second "official" festival. One of its observers was the great theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan, who in a gilded programme, reserved his most rhapsodic praise for the sole Scottish performance, Tyron Guthrie's adaptation of Sir David Lindsay's The Thrie Estaits. It was a production, wrote Tynan, that "erupts with good things".

May we say the same 12 months hence about Sir Jonathan's valedictory apolitical beanfest.