Arts Fest was best yet

When the arts are in the news, they're usually in the news looking for money. When budgets — both personal and political — get tight, the arts are often the first to feel the pinch.

That's why it was refreshing to read about this year's Utah Arts Festival. It was, by all accounts, a roaring success. More than 77,000 people visited the event, staying longer and doing more than in past years. The weather held. And the 130 visual artists, as a group, did very well.

It has taken the event three decades to finally get all the pieces together — location, times, dates, invited artists, venues. But this year hit the bull's-eye. Our congratulations to organizers.

Artists have always needed patrons, of course. In the early days, kings and queens paid for people to paint. Rich landowners, foundations and — in recent times — universities and various levels of government have all pitched in to play patron to the arts. But ask any artist and you'll learn that the patron he or she appreciates most is the public — the consumer who is willing to lay out good money for good art.

This year at Library Square those patrons were out in force, credit cards in hand.

Next year promises to be even better.

At a time when the arts are having to scramble in Utah, when more and more people are seeing art as mere embellishment — as filigree on the edges of life — it's heartening to find so many who still understand that our arts, like our religions, are what make us most human. Like a barometer of the soul, the arts measure the quality of the human spirit in a place.

Last week, that art barometer in Salt Lake City gave a high reading.

And for artists, getting to actually sell artwork was a welcome respite from the ongoing process of convincing the world that art is an investment in humanity.