In “Manchester United,” Kate Sutton writes up the big-name art events in the Manchester International Festival on Artforum.com. Unfortunately it was in Scene and Herd, the mag’s gossip column/photos-of-beautiful-people section.

MIF sounds phenomenal — few cities are brave enough to host a festival of new visual arts and performance commissions of that scale. It’s nice to see coverage of the Marina Abramovich-curated exhibition at the Whitworth and Jeremy Deller’s populist-meets-conceptualist Procession, though Sutton overlooked local and emerging artists, and their varied and experimental MIF initiative, Contemporary Art Manchester.

I could have done without the author’s dishy commentary. She punctuates her reportage with snarky asides, as well as needless and predictable snooty (and classist) jabs at Mancunians at large. The “unity” conjured in the title contrasts sharply with her cynical dismissal of the very publics who host these events–and her as an art-tourist.