Serendipity Arts Festival Impact Analysis – 2018

Key Findings

• Initiating and channelling the development of new art practice in multidisciplinary arts: With 93 projects across seven disciplines, the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) showcases a significant display of India’s soft power. The festival draws over 900 artists from India and abroad, who are led by acclaimed curators. The SAF helps in addressing a critical gap in public funding for arts and art practices, which is generally more skewed towards exhibition and presentation.
• Significantly contributing to the brand of Goa, raising its cultural capital: The SAF has attracted new and diverse audiences who are deeply appreciative of this new cultural offering of the state, thereby developing a brand of tourism that stands in contrast with the general “party tourism” brand of Goa. Festival visitors, Goan residents and tourists spoke of the quality of cultural offerings that both showcased the variety and breadth of India’s culture and introduced them to a side of Goa that they had not experienced before.
• Demonstrating the potential of well-supported and well-managed cultural festivals to become key contributors to the local economy: For the last two decades, research in the field of the creative economy has explored the contribution of the cultural sector and related industries to the economy of a nation, including jobs, direct revenue growth, and indirect spillover into related sectors such as tourism and digital industries. In that respect, the SAF 2018 demonstrated promising contributions to both the local and cultural economies.