The fine line between the arts and cultural tourism has been so blurred over the past couple of decades that only partisan zealots of purism in the arts claim to be aware of it.

Virtually every blockbuster exhibition in a major public art gallery justifies its budget and existence with claims about the amount of money it has contributed to the local economy. The rest is a bit of a battle concerning who is the best for delivering the event and the balance between cultural capital and economic capital involved in the event – the balance between popularist crowd-pleasers and serious thought-provoking art.

The two biggest cultural events in the harbour city are Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi that annually attracts half a million visitors and Vivid, the Festival of Light, that last year brought 1.7 million visitors to Sydney. Both events are free, democratic and secular and a runaway success with the broader public – and both attract frowns from hard-core arts professionals. Personally, I find myself supporting and enjoying both and an event that attracts hundreds of thousands of people and has an art content surely cannot be a bad thing.

From a fairly modest affair with projections on buildings around Circular Quay and the Opera House in 2009, Vivid now boasts phenomenal success and has few serious rivals anywhere around the world. In a dream scenario for any cultural tourism event, Vivid is seriously tackling crowd control measures; this year extending the event by half-a-dozen nights to make it 23 nights, and extending the range of venues to include the Royal Botanical Gardens, which is marking its 200th anniversary; Taronga Zoo, which is celebrating its centenary; and The Galeries on George Street.

The two outstanding highlights, at least for me, are the lighting spectacular on the sails of the Sydney Opera House and the Cathedral Of Light in the Botanic Garden. The Opera House has become the focus for an indigenous festival of lights, titled Songlines, curated by Rhoda Roberts. The six selected Indigenous artists, Karla Dickens, Reko Rennie, Djon Mundine, Gabriella Possum Nungurray, the late Gulumba Yunipingu and Donny Woolagoodja, created the concepts and designs, while Artists in Motion transferred them into animated content.

As far as I could determine, it is about a 15-minute loop, where forms are morphed from abstracted sacred designs to floating fish and crawling goannas. Viewed against the Sydney sky and the harbour of lights, it is an amazing experience that can be seen and admired from many perspectives, including from within the Opera House itself.

The Vivid Light Walk ranges from the normal combination of the innovative and awe-inspiring, such as the projections onto the Museum of Contemporary Art and Customs House, to the silly and cheesy, such as the Sound Bubble and the I Love You light pedestal. In the Botanic Gardens, the Cathedral of Light is a 60-metre long, 8-metre high tunnel, which is made up of tens of thousands of LEDs designed as an inside/outside experience. It is a transformative experience that tends to disorient you and transport you into a different realm, away from your everyday encounter with the material world. You emerge from it, as if from a bath of light.

Vivid Music, including the Björk digital world, and Vivid Ideas, with Beau Willimon (creator of House of Cards), Spike Jonze, Jenji Kohan and Margaret Zhang, continue this popular strand into a broader cultural milieu with events designed to occupy the days before the city bursts into light.

At a time when the weather is dreary, politics depressing and the country is buckling down for winter, Vivid presents a brilliant ray of light, guaranteed to bring a smile to your face, tinged with surprise and joy.

Sasha Grishin's travel was assisted by Destination NSW.