Today’s Star reports that ‘Luminato a big success, say organizer’. What is the measure of this success?

‘Attendance was estimated to be more than a million people over the course of the ten days, says festival co-founder David Pecaut. “As you may know we set out an objective originally of half a million, so we more than doubled what we hoped to do in this very first year,” Pecaut said.’

So what if a million people showed up if they all thought it sucked?

Cultural events cannot be measured through numbers. This adds further proof, as Christopher Hume pointed out yesterday, that Luminato functioned as ‘A Businessman’s Notion of a Festival’.

Cultural success should be measured in memories and wonder, which is too ephemeral for a spreadsheet, and too long term for quarterly results.