The study analyzes the cultural and tourism innovation development of Tianmei Art Neighborhood by using the EA-Malmquist model, and integrates the influential relationship between higher art education and the efficiency of local cultural and tourism innovation development by combining the vector autoregressive model. The integrated technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of the four areas of Tianmei Art Neighborhood are measured based on the total annual customer consumption data of Tianmei Art Neighborhood from 2015 to 2024, and the VAR model is established on the basis of cointegration test, impulse response and variance decomposition through Granger causality test for variables. The results show that the overall level of comprehensive efficiency of cultural tourism industry innovation in the four regions of Tianmei Art Block is high, but there is obvious variability among the regions. The efficiency of local cultural tourism innovation and development will promote higher art education, and the long-term effect on higher art education is significant (the significance level is 5%), and higher art education has a certain promotion effect on the efficiency of local cultural tourism innovation and development.
