Manchester. Not original. Not modern.

Ahead of the opening of the Manchester International Festival in nine days time, it is perhaps worth dwelling for a moment on the words of Nick Johnson, the head of Marketing Manchester, as he promoted the Festival in New York earlier this year. Of his strapline, "Manchester. Original. Modern," he was reported by the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead as saying, "What it's encouraging everyone in the city to do is to ask the question: Is what I'm doing original and modern?" As yet no-one has been struck down in St Ann Square on exiting Starbucks by the existential crisis this demand would inspire, but there is the nagging question of the consequences of failure to participate in the urban flashmob army. Banishment to Bury? Accompanying Johnson in New York was city council leader, Sir Richard Leese, who of the strapline interjected with the wonderfully heartfelt, if worryingly vacuous comment, "It's not a slogan - it's a brand signifier".

Marketing terminology aside, the slogan is an odd choice. As much as Manchester might claim originality and modernity as the cradle of the industrial revolution, it has in recent decades understood itself in its representations and stories. The ecstasy of this is that as a city Manchester knows that it is caught in its stories. We know that Manchester is not Coronation Street, Shameless or Cold Feet even if we nod ironically to these stories on an almost daily basis. That Mancunians inhabit stories was precisely the point of Twenty-Four Hour Party People. " Print the legend," says Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson quoting John Huston, while telling us that the legend is not the reality. These stories, our desire to inhabit them, the way they help us understand our lives suggest that Manchester, far from being original or modern, may in fact be a mythical place. In understanding this, Manchester rejects the idea of originality and authenticity, a defining practice not of modernity but of postmodernity.

The Manchester International Festival is itself part of this myth. Billed as "The world's first international festival of original, new work," it is designed to position Manchester as a centre of creativity of international standing. But even a cursory glance at the programme suggests we pause to question the originality of the work. First up on the Festival website is Industrial Revolution, a clubnight whose very name gestures to that moment of "original modernity" in the eighteenth century and take of Factory Records in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth. The principle behind the work of the event's performers, who include DJ Shadow, the Unabombers, Fat Boy Slim, is of course quotation. The launch event, Monkey: Journey to the West, is, we learn in the detail, "based on an ancient Chinese legend," while we might ask where would Victoria Borisova-Ollas, composer of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, be without the novel of the same title by Salman Rushdie?

In this morass of quotation and allusion, we might ask in what sense is the word "original" being used. The question is not pedantic. To bill a festival of creative work featuring artists who clearly reject notions of originality as original to an audience who do the same is to risk ridicule, insult your audience, or demonstrate a philistine approach to the creative process. That is to say, artists and writers have through the ages suffered those existential crises on exiting Starbucks as they are poleaxed by their own lack or originality and mediocrity. For Horace it was the art of poetry to make the ordinary seem original, with the result that he is reputed to have also written that, "He who knows a thousand works of art knows a thousand and frauds." More recently, T.S. Eliot put it more baldly: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." In this sense the history of art is the history of theft.

Which brings us back to the claim of Manchester's later day Medici's that their Festival is "The world's first international festival of original, new work," a claim which shows a marked indifference to, for example, the Venice Biennale, now in its 57th year, or the work of the Edinburgh Festivals. It is, of course these, which Leese, Johnson and other city fathers wish the Manchester International Festival to rival. They are to be applauded for their aspiration, but it is neither an original nor modern aspiration; Edinburgh and Venice got there before them. As Coogan/Wilson points out Manchester is like Renaissance Florence, and in the intention to put an artist on every corner, Leese has created a festival of thieves and frauds which will only add to the myth that is Manchester. And for that, their "brand signifier" might be the greatest work of art of the festival.

Other takes on the MIF - [added 19 June 2007]

Yankunian at the Manchizzle tells about Not the Manchester International Festival and being MIFed on Portland Street by the New Yorker article.

Diehard Manchester media bunnies at 1 Scott Place produce this surprising result at Comment is Free: