Serendipity Arts Festival Impact Analysis – 2018

Author: Rashmi Dhanwani, Dipti Rao and Poorvaja Sivaraman, for the Art X Company·16 Sep 2025

Topics

Festival Management

Legal and Policy

Programming and Curation

Reporting and Evaluation

The Serendipity Arts Festival Impact Analysis is a research study that measures and analyses the Serendipity Arts Festival’s role in generating cultural, social, economic and place-based impacts on its various stakeholders during its 2018 edition. The results emphasise the potential of a cultural project of scale as an enabler of socio-cultural transformation, including a change of perception of the site, the state of Goa. The study was conducted on the festival site in 2018 by the Art X Company, a strategy and research consultancy specialising in the creative sector.

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.