I posted a screed on Burning Man five years ago. Since then I have found little reason to amend said screed.
It’s pasted below. For those of you with the tl;dr reflex, here’s the nut: “Faced with one of the last truly wild landscapes left in the US, their response is to build a city. This is not creativity: it is dreadful, dull conformity. Finding one of the last sublime remnants of the unpopulated West, they want nothing more than to pack it with tender urbanites in a glorified tailgate party. This is not an alternative way of life: it is standard American operating procedure.”
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I didn’t go to Burning Man this year.
This wasn’t a reaction to what some call the increasing commercialization of the annual event out on the Black Rock playa. I didn’t go last year, or the year before that either. You might say I was not going to the thing before it was hip.
The Burning Man, to tell the truth, has always left me a bit cold. For one thing, I don’t seem to need what it provides all the people who go every year. I do understand the appeal of traveling out to the barren desert to walk among hastily built ramshackle structures, talking with sun-addled eccentrics. It’s just that I spend enough time in Barstow already.
I know. That’s not fair. Barstow is a stultifying town where the residents must contend with a plague of methamphetamine and unemployment, federal budget cuts turning disabled veterans out onto the littered streets, and outsiders pause only long enough to gas up and speed off toward Vegas, while the Burning Man is a deliberate expression of the most creative elements of the modern artistic and performance communities.
OK, so maybe Barstow still sounds better.
I don’t have anything against the intent of the event. I know a few people who go every year, and they’re perfectly nice. But here’s the thing.
There is a spectacular mountain range directly above the site of the event. It’s called the Granite Range, an outlier of the Sierra Nevada batholith out in the middle of the desert. It’s a steep range with dramatic relief, one of the most beautiful small mountain ranges I’ve ever seen. And every year, thousands of people gather directly under the Granites. I read probably twenty thousand words of celebratory prose each year describing Burning Man, and I have seen the Granite Range mentioned exactly once, in William Fox’s Playa Works: The Myth Of The Empty
How self-absorbed do you need to be not to notice a mountain range? I understand that having all those folks walking around wearing only paint and strips of tinfoil can be a little distracting. But not noticing a mountain range for a whole week? Or even worse: noticing it, but finding it unremarkable?
There’s a section of the San Francisco Bay shore called the Emeryville mudflats. Decades ago, local artists wandered out to the mudflats, gathered driftwood and other detritus, and built odd sculptures. The works, which were featured in the movie Harold and Maude, were charming and popular. The only problem was, the mudflats were a fragile environment ill-suited to repeated trampling. Eventually, environmentalists persuaded the arts community that the sculptures weren’t worth the damage to migratory birds, but it took some time, and there was loud whining from aggrieved artists. They looked out over the rich pickleweed flats, the mud with its millions of microorganisms at the mouth of Temescal Creek, the sanderlings and clapper rails and egrets, and said “but there’s nothing out there!”
But there’s nothing out there! The complaint of the shopping mall developer, of the landfill operator. Behold the majestic playa, utterly flat tan soil stretching away to the vanishing point, distances paradoxically both magnified and obscured by the Perfect Euclidean Geometry of it all. Do you wander out alone, mesmerized by the shimmering horizon, the immensity and the dust devils kicking up shades of old Winnemucca’s people? Do you seek solace in the wind, the sun, the solitude? Or do you, bored, find the scene lacking? Do you long for blue glowsticks and a hundred boom boxes blaring inane techno and a thousand pretentious performance artists bleating about their alienation?
The organizers do a yeoman job of cleaning up after the revelers, of training them not to set fires directly on the playa floor. They strain after each stray pistachio shell. They remonstrate over cigarette wrappers. This is as it should be. But they bring thousands of cars out onto the playa, there to kick up tons of dust to coat the Granite Range junipers. They compress and crush the playa soils, delicate layers of pollen-laden biological historical record, unknown microorganisms in unknown quantities. I have turned over slabs of playa and found thin green life two inches beneath the surface. As far as Burning Man is concerned, this stratified mystery is but a parking lot.
Faced with one of the last truly wild landscapes left in the US, their response is to build a city. This is not creativity: it is dreadful, dull conformity. Finding one of the last sublime remnants of the unpopulated West, they want nothing more than to pack it with tender urbanites in a glorified tailgate party. This is not an alternative way of life: it is standard American operating procedure.
Yes, this exactly. I’m not a fan of hot deserts myself (my personal pigmentation is “Whiter Shade of Pale” and I overheat fairly easily), but this was precisely my reaction when I first heard about Burning Man.
I’m one of those people who loves salt marshes with a passion, even the smell—which to me is the smell of life itself.
Bravo.
I really like this. I have many friends who have extolled its virtues to me over the years, knowing about my interest in the desert. It has not seemed right to me, but I held off judgement since I have not been there - before, after or during the event. Thsi confirms my worst fears of the event.
As always, the needs are desires of people trump everything else. Heaven forbid we should have to change our ways!
Your description of the Granite Range makes me want to go there as I also have a love of desert mountains. I have wondered about water availability for hiking there though.
This is not an alternative way of life: it is standard American operating procedure. Very true. All sculpture is environmentally costly. The bigger and more public, the more the cost. I don’t see what to do about it. I’m of the view that sculpture is a testament to our tragic nature. We burn the days. I know I should quit doing sculpture, but can’t. Maybe you could help me to quit? :^)
I agree with Chris. Leave the place alone. The whole thing is egotistical. Art should delight not disgust.
Excellent! Unfortunately, those who need most to comprehend the intricacies of these truths will find nothing more meaningful than something to complain about. As is the American way, this somehow victimizes them and you somehow become just another anti-art lunatic trying to infringe on their freedom of expression.
I remember reading this 5 years back! Good lord man, have I been reading your blog for that long already? Why, I even remembered the post just a few days back when I saw this news item.
Excellent article, I too find it depressing and symptomatic of our whole attitude to the environment that we take nicely unspoilt areas and then spoil them in this way. And ‘there’s nothing there!’ is just woefully too often the human response to wilderness
Upon further reflection, I think this is why I like urban art and graffiti so much: it puts art where the people already are, and much graffiti is just as transient as Burning Man. Street art is art that doesn’t have to be separate from everyday life to be appreciated.
Now, part of what people seem to get out of BM is Carneval, but one where entry has a high degree-of-difficulty and cost. Carneval for the Special People, but also for the devoted. I wonder how they could get that part of the experience without having to go to the wilderness and de-wild it?
Now, I’ve never made it out to burning man myself, so I can’t comment directly on the festival. Chris Clarke makes a great point, and being from the desert, I echo his comments about the ecosystem being fascinating when you take the time to see it. But, that said, some people are interested in art more than nature, I think that’s ok. People who don’t live/grow up in deserts find them exotic and fragile. All ecosystems are exotic to someone, and fragile, from salmon streams in Oregon to forests in Pennsylvania and Prairie in the midwest.
In the final analysis though, we allow tourism in our national parks and other preserved areas for many reasons, including the fact that they allow people to learn to find them of value. For some, yes, that value is going to be a great place to have a tailgate party. We shouldn’t be so narrow minded as to say everyone has to have a high level appreciation of natural beauty to use natural spaces - some enjoy hiking, some enjoy skiing, some just like a cheap place to have a family reunion. As long as everyone’s respectful of the surroundings, I see nothing wrong with that.
The cost of entry to Burning Man is actually substantially less than Carneval - I can’t afford a hotel room for a week during Carneval, I probably could afford the $100 or so tickets and a tent for a few days.
You absolutely could not have Burning man in a city. It would be a spectacle, participants would be harassed, and the flow of the festival would be disrupted by people not participating. It’s not for everyone, I’m not sure it’s for me, but thousands of people do seem to find some value in it.
But thousands of people also do find some value in donning vivid plastic take-me-to-your-leader body-helmets and riding chokefuming gasoline-powered dirtbikes around fragile desert ecosystems, too.
The difference is Art?
or what?
Watch the Reno 911 episode where Officer Jim Dangle and 2 others go to Burning Man to bust drug dealers. It’s most definitely High Art.