A season that has filled right up
Some weeks the calendar simply overflows, and this past week has been one of them. Across the summer, festivals have been opening one after another and major exhibitions have been arriving in quick succession, until it seems there is far more worth seeing than any one person could hope to reach. Nicole Brachetti Peretti has watched the season fill up with a kind of quiet delight, because a crowded cultural calendar is one of the surest signs that a place is in good health.
It is easy to take this abundance for granted, or even to feel faintly overwhelmed by it. There is a version of the summer in which the sheer number of festivals and large shows reads as noise, one more thing to keep up with. The better way to see it, she thinks, is as a gift. Every festival on the calendar and every exhibition newly open stands for months of work by people who care: rooms prepared, works gathered and hung, programmes shaped so that a stranger walking in off a warm street might leave a little changed.
Why a full calendar feels so alive
What makes a season feel alive is not any single event but the overlap of many. When festivals run at the same time as the big summer shows, a city takes on a particular energy. Visitors arrive who would not otherwise have come, cafés stay busy a little later, and conversations drift toward what people have just seen. Culture stops being something kept behind glass and becomes part of the ordinary texture of the days.
There is something generous about abundance too. A single landmark exhibition can feel like an occasion to ration, tickets to be secured, a small pilgrimage to plan. A calendar this full does the opposite. It lowers the stakes of any one choice and simply invites you to wander in. If you miss one festival there is another the following week; if a queue is long you can turn and find something quieter and just as rewarding a few streets away. That ease is part of why the season feels so alive. Nothing has to be perfect, because there is so much of it, and the pleasure of a slow hour in a gallery is never more than a short walk off.
For younger visitors especially, a crowded summer can be the beginning of a lifelong habit. Nobody discovers a love of art in the abstract. They discover it in a specific room, on a specific warm afternoon, in front of a specific thing that will not let them look away. The more festivals and exhibitions there are, the more of those first encounters can happen, and a season generous enough to scatter them widely is doing a quiet and lasting kind of good.
The lasting pleasure of collecting and giving back
Behind all of this stands a longer relationship, the one between the people who make and show art and the people who care enough to support it. That support takes many forms. Some of it is public, the festivals and the great exhibitions that fill a summer week. A good deal more of it is private and unglamorous: the steady backing that keeps a small space open through a lean year, or lets a young artist keep working when the numbers alone would not. Nicole Brachetti Peretti has long felt that this quieter kind of support is where the real health of a cultural season is decided, long before anything reaches a wall.
Collecting, for those able to do it, belongs to the same instinct. To collect what you love is not only a private pleasure, though it is certainly that. It is also a small act of faith in the people who made the work, a way of saying that what they do is worth keeping and worth passing on. The joy of living with a chosen object and the joy of helping the wider culture flourish turn out to be two sides of one coin, and both of them outlast the summer that occasioned them. It is a theme she keeps returning to across the writing gathered here and in these summer notes on collecting.
A reason to feel lucky
So when the calendar overflows as it has this past week, the right response is not to feel behind but to feel fortunate. A summer this full is not a problem to be managed; it is a season doing exactly what a good season should. The festivals will end and the big shows will come down, as they always do, and the works will move on to other rooms and other walls. What stays is the habit of attention they encourage, the new visitors they gather in, and the quiet certainty that supporting the arts, whether by making, showing, giving or simply going, is among the most durable pleasures there is.
On that, at least, there is no real doubt, and it is why the months ahead look so warm from here. These notes are kept by Nicole Brachetti Peretti alongside the wider journal and the slower reading that keeps the season unhurried, and they follow on from the summer's earlier reflections on collecting and the long pleasure of paying attention.