Obviously, where a cultural phenomenon stands in relation to the mainstream is a matter of perspective; I started building large-scale artwork in the Bay Area in 2007, and still consider myself a relative newcomer to a scene that is constantly evolving. There will always be, for instance, those Burning-Man-Types who – driven by in-crowd snobbery, jadedness or genuine resentment – complain, no matter what the year's event holds, that "last year was better." Indeed, some have been lamenting the festival's death from overexposure ever since growing numbers prompted the official formation of the Organization in 1997; the subsequent outlawing of dogs, guns and cars made Burning Man favorites like the drive-by-shooting range impossible and did much to curb the event's lawless nature, which for many attendees was the whole point.
A more recent schism erupted around the two-year incarceration performance artist Paul Addis served after he torched 2007's Green Man, in what he insisted was not felony arson but merely an act of self-expression in the extreme, a protest against Burning Man's departure from its radical roots. And perhaps the most dramatic indicator of the event's changing nature has been the first-ever sell-out in 2011 and the ensuing ticket lotteries, which have struggled to address admission for long-time artists and event participants in the face of flooding newcomers. And while a rash of books, documentaries and pop-culture shoutouts in movies and TV shows have helped make Burning Man something of a social reference point for a while now, the event was unambiguously outed with this year's Spark: a Burning Man Story, which has enjoyed widespread distribution on Netflix, and has two songs on its soundtrack shortlisted for Oscar nominations.
But these are superficial indicators when compared to other markers of Burning Man's effect on mainstream culture, especially its very real, if often nebulous, connection to Silicon Valley, paradigm-shifting startup companies, and multi-billion dollar businesses such as Google. It's no secret that entrepreneurs and CEOs (along with movie stars, politicians, famous musicians and other celebrities) attend the event in significant numbers and finance some of its largest projects; tech innovators openly cite Burning Man as inspiration behind the success of hugely profitable companies like Zappos, and while it's easy to shrug off evidence of the event's revelatory nature — like Adam Lambert's decision to try out for American Idol while 'shrooming at that Burn — with an eye roll, the tangible evidence of the event's deep social and economic impacts is impossible to ignore. What is not known, however, is how much of the original innovation that makes it out to the desert ends up back in the default world, profiting someone other than its original innovator.
Sold-out tickets and a murkily disclosed transition to nonprofit entity (comprising unspecified payouts for the Burning Man Org's current partners) have stoked widespread discontent over a seeming departure from the festival's central tenet of decomercialization — unrest important enough to earn a thorough musing in the New York Times. It's all part of the growing sense that, perhaps, what we bring out to the desert somehow isn't for us anymore.
It's hard to know how to handle this sense of unease, and especially hard when it concerns earnest efforts at community improvement that are nonetheless tied implicitly or explicitly to profit and notoriety for the most zealous entrepreneurs charging into the world under the aegis and protection of the Burning Man umbrella. I'm a great believer, for instance, in the Burning Man Project's efforts to use the festival's principles to positively impact urban design, but can understand the impulse to question when and how those positive changes will emerge, and how they will stack up against the perks garnered directly by the program's evangelists. Even though I worked directly with the Project a while back and staunchly support its efforts still, the question of how an ineffable phantasm created by the masses can be reined into service for a real-world organization, an alter-ego with budgets and equity and payouts for the few, remains. And the question is even more crucial when the organization is no longer Burning Man itself, but a third party altogether.
For those who relied on the miracle and refuge of this place to recharge their creative engines and redirect real-world work and ideals implicitly, there will no doubt be something strange about the dizzying pace with which it is now seeming to migrate, wholesale and explicitly, to the wider world. Everything from the increasingly self-referential nature of Burning Man art (paintings, t-shirts, and even art cars and whole installations covered with pictures of . . . past art cars and installations) to the very alt-referential nature of Zappos founder Tony Hsieh's plan to Burning-Man-ify downtown Vegas appearing online at CNN Money, points to the quickening pace at which this culture is growing and reproducing itself. From a fertile soil laid down over more than twenty years, the fruits of our labor are springing at an ever-faster rate, and if we want to share them (as, of course, most of us do), we'd better get a move on it, because they're being harvested right now. It's incredibly validating and also bit unnerving, in the exact same way as flipping through those photos of Symbiosis.
Its not to say that participants' creativity and hard work don't bleed into the wider world without the help of venture capitalists and big organizations. Festival-goers in the Bay Area basically created their own security force, High Rock Security, which has become adept at dealing with the specific challenges (everything from dangerous art installations to the complications of psychedelics) that sometimes accompany out-there events. They are now a go-to agency, whether at a remote location or in the city. Likewise, thousands of crafters have contributed to a unique and totally identifiable body of fashion, emphasizing convenience in concert with other-wordly looks: giant furry jackets that guard against falling temperatures, vests and belts with built-in pockets, fuzzy legwarmers and flat platform boots for cozy comfort over fashion-at-all-costs. Online marketplaces such as Etsy are fairly erupting with festival-inspired fashions that support individual artisans and small-time clothing brands, and these looks are becoming more and more common as daywear in the Bay Area. Hundreds of artists and entrepreneurs in all fields still receive funding, exposure, and the inspiration to follow their dreams without ever interacting with the capitalist forces widely perceived to be making inroads into Burning Man and festivals like it.
But it would be foolish not to question how long such small-scale successes can hold out when every year more and more cameras are interloping (drones taking video and a large IMAX-shooting blimp were unavoidable at the Burn this year), more blogs and articles are emerging, and more people are wising up to the resources and opportunities inherent in the strange and tender miracle of these gatherings.
So what does it mean that Symbiosis has made it to the most iconic media outlet for music and pop culture? In a word, money. And that might not be bad. Money is going to be made in this world, no matter what, and if it can be made according to, or inspired by, models highly committed to creativity, community and social justice, all the better.
But that doesn't mean that participants' concerns, including my own nebulous unease over the migration of artifacts and ideas from Symbiosis, Burning Man and the like into mainstream culture, are unwarranted. It's not because I don’t want to share these wonderful cultural curiosities with the whole world. It's not even because I'm worried about all those unnamed artists whose beautiful notions are swept up into some wider scheme without their directly benefitting. This is the nature of creativity, and though it behooves us all to make sure that original work is recognized and compensated fairly, there are practical limits to that notion.
My concern is that, removed from their context, something of the power of these places gets lost. They make it into Rolling Stone because they are hotbeds of passionate expression, made all the more fabulous because everyone participates in making them so. They are where the traditional artisit-audience or performer-audience dichotomy breaks down — radical participation, for those of you who familiar with the Playa’s ten principles. They are delicate ecosystems, and no glossy magazine pages, not even an IMAX film, can quite capture the unique nature of the spontaneous interaction that happens out there. Though the strange exotic fruits of these places can be shipped out, their habitat – their rich soil of innovation laid down over all those years – must be protected like a rare climate. If the whole world is to benefit from the beautiful things that bloom out there, then it only seems logical that some sort of "out there" remain, even as we germinate its seeds everywhere. If the whole exercise is reduced to snippets, images, fascimiles simplified into a developer's agenda or reproduced by the media, we are forced to admit that the experience is just that — mediated. It's fine to partake of, but it is not the same as generating something new and authentic. Authenticity is what makes these images Rolling Stone-worthy in the first place. It's what makes the business models viable, the fashions fresh, the urban planning strategies vibrant. As soon as these images and facsimiles become persistent in the environment, there is the danger that they will be mistaken for the real thing. And with that danger comes the danger of disappearance of the real thing altogether.
Practically speaking, what does this mean? How does one differentiate between a valid reinterpretation of something learned during a revelation in the desert, and a crass capitalization on the ideas of others? I'm really not sure. Except to say that we must go slowly and carefully, never being so thrilled with the magic of these richly-yeilding soils that we use them up in their entirely, rather than feeding them so that they to help sustain and inspire us for the long term. We can never take more than we give back, or the delicate balance is destroyed.
