Edinburgh's lunatic Fringe lives on One common complaint about the seven branches of the Edinburgh Festivals (International, Fringe, Jazz, Art, Book, Film, and Television) is that concentrating them all in the high summer months sucks the money and energy out of the city for the rest of the year, and in particular leaves the autumn a parched cultural desert. It may well be hard to find a decent concert, opera or play in Scotland's capital over the coming weeks, but one area where the drought warning doesn't apply is the visual arts. All the terrific exhibitions recently reviewed by Richard Dorment and Alastair Sooke (Catherine the Great at the National Museum of Scotland, Symbolism and G-B Lusieri at the Scottish National Gallery, Philip Guston at Inverleith House and Dieter Roth at the Fruitmarket among them), plus smaller commercial shows such as Ian Hamilton Finlay at the Ingleby Gallery, continue through this month, making Edinburgh one of Europe's major hubs for art lovers. I'd also urge anyone in town not to miss out on Summerhall, where the current programme runs until September 27. I suppose you could describe this institution as providing the magnificently lunatic Fringe to the mainstream events listed above. Housed in what used to be Edinburgh University's veterinary science faculty on the edge of the Meadows, Summerhall's financial backing is provided by the economist and philanthropist Robert McDowell. The mix of shows brewed for its second year defies easy description. The building has been abandoned rather than converted and it's pretty ramshackle and dilapidated - a warren of dingy, musty labs, classrooms, lecture theatres and store rooms accommodate over 30 small exhibitions, a lot of them bizarre if not downright potty. I absolutely adored it: overseen by an amiable eccentric of a curator-dealer specialising in conceptualism called Paul Robertson, everyone there is contributing for the love of it, in a spirit of youthful creative adventure and uninhibited anarchy. Edges are left unabashedly rough, and there's some ridiculous and pretentious rubbish to wade through. But established artists are on show as well as greenhorns, and parts of the archive of the maverick pioneer of the Edinburgh avant-garde art scene Richard Demarco (still going strong in his mid-Eighties) are also on display if you fancy a bit of Beuys or Abramovic. The best for me was David Michalek's Figure Studies and Slow Dancing, a three-screen video installation, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge and Bill Viola, in which a series of figures (from babies to octogenarians, exquisite ballerinas to the morbidly obese), executing a variety of movements over five seconds, is projected at a pace that makes each motion last seven minutes (21,000 frames in all). It might sound a bit hackneyed and déjà vu, but I found it deeply compelling - a revelation of the beauty of the human animal in all its manifold guises and the operations of the musculature that propel it. Admission to Summerhall is free, the building is open most days until 9pm and there's a great bar and café too. Art lives here.