It’s the season when people’s thought turn to BigThink about
Burning
Man, the ever-growing (now over 60,000 people) festival of art
and excess and community that appears and disappears every year the
week before Labor Day in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
I am quoted at some length today in both a
New York Times and
an ABC News story focusing on a story so hot it’s been on the
burner (ha.) since at least 1996 when Wired did a cover
story on the event, and 1997 when Time called it “the
bonfire of the techies”: rich people from the tech industry go to
that event, and some of them even act rich there! Why do rich
techies like it? Because it’s awesome, and because it was born of
their Bay Area art and wild creativity scenes.
This bothers some Burning Man people, but not me. As I told
ABC News:
Brian Doherty, senior editor of Reason magazine and author of
the book, “This is Burning Man,” has been to the event for the last
20 years. In his tenth anniversary e-book reissue of his work, he
includes an afterward that discusses some of the class issues that
have arisen.“As someone going to the event for now 20 years straight, I’m
not sure why people are bothered by the increasing presence of tech
industry folk and their money at the event,” he told ABC News.Wealthy attendees can bring their resources where they go, and
that includes contributing to one of the centerpieces of Burning
Man: artistic expression.“Some of the most amazing art you see out there–which I hope is
part of the reason people want to go there, to see staggering works
of art of a variety and scope you can’t find in the normal art
world–takes big money to make, and a lot of that money is tech
money,” he said…..“And to me it seems based in just weird class anxiety–the idea
that other people are having an easier time of it than you because,
say, they can afford a really nice air conditioned trailer or even
essentially servants to feed them and take care of them. That does
happen,” he said.Doherty acknowledges that it’s easy to poke fun at these
services, or to say that attendees are missing the point of Burning
Man.“But to me, if you let the fact that someone else is
experiencing Burning Man differently than you choose to really bum
you out or ruin your good time, you are the one who is missing the
point,” he said. “If not for the big art they help fund, there is
no reason for the typical burner to even know that super-rich
techies are there, except reading about it in the paper.”
This is as good a time as any to hype that on its 10th
anniversary, I’ve produced a 10th anniversary ebook-only edition of
my first-and-best history of the event This is Burning Man,
selling for the ebook-appropriate price of $4.99, thanks Amazon!
And the edition is self-published, hint hint.
Bonus Burning Maniana: Elizabeth Limbach
discusses the culture of “gifting” and potlach that animates an
event at which explicit cash for goods and services is officially
discouraged. Of course, our fun and art there is a result of the
excess spilled by modern capitalism such that 60,000 of us can
survive off of what we can afford to bring and consume, in often
very high style, from the world outside the desolate dry lake bed
we call home for a week during Burning Man.
From Limbach:
Burning Man is best known for its abundant art, including
large-scale installations that protrude from the monotone earth
like surreal trees in an unruly forest. The organization dishes out
art grants to nourish these expensive projects ($825,000 to 66
installations last year), but many builders also turn to crowd
funding.“Crowdsourcing effectively removes the power from large money
groups to decide what gets made and what doesn’t,” says Matt
Schultz, the artist behind several behemoth Burning Man pieces, of
the crowd-funding phenomenon. “It enables the power of individuals
to decide. It allows us to find the resources we need to make
something amazing. It democratizes the act of production.”
Despite the cultural liberalism that animates many of its
attendees, it is indeed an example of the best of the
anarcho-capitalist vision: people gathering of their own will,
giving freely to the support of the civic structure and culture via
ticket sales and what they expend to make the scene colorful and
spectacular, and making something truly amazing and
unprecedented.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1pW6GwL
via IFTTT