IT'S been a hot and sticky week in August and hundreds and thousands of people are thronging the streets for this, the 50th Edinburgh International Festival, writes Victoria White. Enormous buses are bringing in Americans by the crater load. Poles in black are looking intense in murky theatres. Random Irishmen are busy being Irish in other murky theatres and, oh yes, the festival is a shambles, a jamboree, a plaything of the elite and should be abolished completely. Yes, it's business as usual at the biggest arts festival in the world.

The ritual criticism got off to a sonorous start this year with's George Steiner's lecture at the McEwan Hall on the opening day. Characteristically learned and far reaching, he saw the origins of the festival as an attempt to shift the cultural axis from festivals such as Bayreuth and Salzburg which had been destroyed by Nazism. Steiner praised the festival's 50 years of activity, chronicling the successes of former artistic directors. Of the present Director, Brian McMaster who has been much criticised in other quarters, he said only: "I will not embarrass Mr McMaster, who is among us, by saying how obvious, how dazzling have been his successes".

Steiner then shifted gear and argued that today more original force and creative energy are probably evident in the sciences and mathematics than in the arts, and that the festival which ignores these developments does so at its peril. He argued also that the spirit of the age is expressed more in the work in progress than in finished work and that a festival of workshops and master classes is worth considering. He concluded by suggesting that the festival should at least consider, as it reaches 50, whether or not it has had its day: the underlying issue is that of the organic form and logic in the birth of evolution and possible decay of human institutions."

Is Steiner really so naive as to believe that the Edinburgh festival can have a moral educative imperative only? (He may well be, and that is both the limitation and the great worth of his writings). Meanwhile, its economic imperative has never been more apparent, as over £140 million of festival goers money is taken by restaurateurs, sweet shop owners, chemists, balloon sellers and the Lord knows who else in the Edinburgh region. The festival is an economic fact of life not worth moralising about, but certainly worth enjoying.