If you, like me, are finding the final stretch of this general election more than you can bear, if the agony of suspense is unendurable or the drone of contradictory numbers buzzes in your ears, salvation is at hand.

The Brighton Festival opens today – and it can do for you what the arts should do.

In another realm far from the worn turf trampled over by politics, the arts can take you the distance beyond.

The irony is, of course, that politicians are wrangling over the stuff of life, who we are and what it’s all for, but they just express it so hopelessly badly. Leave expression to the arts.

What delights we offer you over the next three weeks. I defy anyone to look through our programme and fail to find things to enchant or amaze every member of any family of any age.

From great outdoor spectacles to intense happenings in small spaces, with music, dance, books, theatre and visual arts to shock you, make you laugh, sigh or cry.

The great conundrum is how to pick your way through hundreds of events and choose between Carol Ann Duffy speaking her poems in the Dome or Comedie de Picardie’s First World War poetry in the Theatre Royal.

Or Kate Tempest versus Romeo and Juliet in the Brighton Open Air Theatre. Or the singing of Alice Coote and The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler?

So much to anticipate – such as Turner Prize nominated artist Nathan Coley’s new commission, Portraits of Dissension at Regency Town House.

Oh, the unknowable joy of it all.

This year the novelist Ali Smith is our guest director and she has made Taking Liberty, Equality and Freedom one red thread theme that brings Shami Chakrabarti, Billy Bragg, Neil Bartlett and Jackie Kay to the festival.

Previous guest directors include Anish Kapoor, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Rosen, Brian Eno and Aung San Suu Kyi, each bringing their own themes, enlivening each year with their own visions and enthusiasms.

All this happens somewhere beneath the political radar. What happened to discussion of the arts in the campaign?

Tucked away, they are coda in those unread manifestos, too tricky and slippery to weaponise into political bullets.

Yet they matter. As the elusive “march of the makers” slips backwards, the “surge of the arts” is becoming ever more important to our future economic success.

Just think what it encompasses – from performing and visual arts to publishing, music, museums, galleries and libraries as well as film, TV and radio. Don’t forget design, IT, software and advertising: in all these we excel, needing arts graduates and apprentices. Diplomats and generals boast of Britain “punching above our weight” on the world stage, but we need an equivalent metaphor for the arts – “imagining above our brain-capacity” perhaps.

Britain’s creative industries added a record £77bn to the economy in 2013, the latest figures show.

The arts brought in 10 million visitors, creating 6 % of jobs, with every £1 spent in arts and culture generating over £2 in the wider economy.

You want to know what the Festival, the Dome and the Royal Pavilion estate do for Brighton? We bring 1.2m visitors and £60m every year.

And then there’s the spin-off with the mighty Fringe, Artists’ Open Houses and the Great Escape… I could go on and on. But all that is exactly what you don’t need to know. That’s not the point, that’s the politics. It’s what you come to the arts to escape. In the shrivelled economic reductionism that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, all that artistic energy has to be boiled down to tradable gold to prove its worth in hard cash. It would all be worthless if it were no good.

Yet, maybe it won’t all be good. Festivals are for dangerous experiments, to try things never dared before because nothing ever breaks new ground if everything is safe and similar.

Our festival is daring because Brighton is by nature a place for hazarding the shock of the new. So try something perplexing and worrying – alongside the epic and the classic.

We open with Tony award-winning playwright Richard Nelson’s European premiere of his highly acclaimed four play cycle The Apple Family Plays from The Public Theater, New York.

We close on Sunday night, May 24 on Brighton beach with Fleeting, a great spectacular of light, sounds and shifting shapes like a murmuration of starlings. How could you miss any of it?

Brighton Festival runs from 2-24 May. Visit www.brightonfestival.org Polly Toynbee is the chairwoman of Brighton Dome and Festival.