It's too soon to do a recap but there were some brilliant highlights. The Paper Cinema's Odyssey was one. What a jaw-dropping knockout. These people used such simple means to achieve such amazing ends.
The hand sketching and wet-on-wet blotching were fast-work A&P winter showmanship but the moving images and their trembly-hand production were pure cinematograph poetry.
Calder Prescott's direction of the Dunedin City Jazz Orchestra in St Paul's Cathedral was promised by the brochure to get the series ''off to a loud and swinging start''. Mr Prescott, a seasoned showman, in a firm, head-masterly way instructed us to stay deadly silent because the next number would be very quiet.
Which it was, unlike others, more mournful and heralding, though not any more beautiful. The cathedral soared, silent but an approving witness, our best tall stone interior.
Micheline singing Brel in the Glenroy climbed easily up and down the emotional scale while Michael Hurst in No Holds Bard at the Fortune succeeded in tying himself in knots. There were many events and your columnist didn't get to them all but an unusual one, and a highlight, was the Vogel St party on Saturday the 18th.
The rejuvenation of some of our most imposing old commercial buildings in what is now being called the Warehouse Precinct has been advancing at a rapid clip lately.
Together with the new crop of very accomplished murals, not all confined to the Warehouse Precinct, it combines to give the area an impressive sense of re-awakening. And the gathering of thousands in good humour to enjoy it just underlined what has been achieved.
When one thinks of the melancholy which has hung about this part of town for decades it was something more than wonderful to behold.
It was suggested to me it should be made an annual event but I don't think so. The Vogel St party marked a change, the revitalisation of that bit of the city but that wouldn't be true next year, or the one after that.
Rather, I think such events should be kept in mind as an option if and when some other part of the city has a comparable renaissance.
We have a number of recurring events, from the weekly Farmers Market to the annual Fringe Festival and the biennial Arts Festival. It would be good to have some which are just singular.
Certainly, when you look at the range of what is on offer, and here I'm confining myself to the arts, there's a very great deal, quite enough to make the place seem vibrant.
Consider the exhibition openings in places public and private. Think of the performances by our Dunedin-based groups, the Fortune, the Globe, the Opera Company, the Sinfonia to name only some but also the offerings we get from elsewhere at the Regent, the Glenroy and the Town Hall, not to mention the recurring film festivals at several venues.
There are also poetry readings, street events and much more beside so the daily, weekly and seasonal pulse of the arts is really quite healthy. I think it's important to note things which seem particularly impressive, naming names, even though this is bound to be selective.
Similarly, it is not just civic pride which leads me to indicate, again incompletely, the rich flow of events which is the city's artistic heartbeat. These are things to celebrate. But people should also be aware that this vitality is fragile and there are things which sometimes threaten it.
I've mentioned before that Creative New Zealand (CNZ), the national arts funding body, can cause concern. Some of its recent decisions seem hard to fathom.
Its grant to the Otago Festival of the Arts Trust for 2014, a performance year, was $60,000, the lowest it's ever been. The city council, knowing the festival was struggling, made the largest grant it has yet. CNZ seemed to be saying the festival needed to prove itself.
The council was acknowledging it was on the mend but needed a hand. In the past CNZ has poured money into organisations which were foundering. Here its approach was different.
Also CNZ gave the body which runs the Festival of Colour, a biennial based in Wanaka, $10,000 for 2014 and $90,000 for 2015, its performance year. OK, that group was presenting its Aspiring Conversations this year.
Even so, the disparity between the grants to the bodies in their performance years is striking. Is this reverse population-based funding? Other CNZ grants seem like the opposite.
CNZ also funds specific festival events. Our opera company applied for the Anthony Ritchie production, which ticked all the funder's boxes. It got nothing and was told to apply to the festival trust. The splendour we enjoyed didn't come without a struggle.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
