Spring Festival Report: Leaving the Garden

It's March, and to many of us who concern ourselves with the power of events to shape communities, that means the beginning of festival season. With decisions on Burning Man grants rolling in, the ticket sale hurdle humped over once again (the third time, it seems, really is a charm; this year’s Directed Group Sale alleviated substantial angst for artists and other Burners whose long-time affiliation with the event warranted special consideration in the wake of past ticket woes) and preparations for the first of the summer’s major West-Coast events in the frantic final stages (at the Box Shop, it’s a last-minute push to pack up 2 Squared for Coachella – now that we’ve begun painting the piece, I haven’t been properly flesh-colored for days!) it seems like a good time for a roundup of the festival scene and its ever-changing ties to the broader community.

Most significantly, the 2014 festival season marks the completion of Burning Man's transition to nonprofit entity, as a subsidiary of the 501c3Burning Man Project. Like everyone else with a stake in the community, I’ve been wondering exactly how this transition will continue to manifest, and I find it especially amusing that in a recent SFGate article on the topic, Larry Harvey is quoted using the same garden-based metaphor as I did last year when I ruminated on this topic – not without a small sense of unease, I will admit – in the wake of a festival season which could only be said to have been grappling with the growing pains of increasing exposure to, and interest from, tech entrepreneurs, investors, and the media at large.

“After 24 years of tending our garden in the desert we now have the means to cultivate its culture worldwide," Larry Harvey told the Burning Man community newspaper Jackrabbit Speaks, a statement which was re-quoted in the more recent article. "Sometimes things just pop and this is one of those moments.

Aurora after its Novermber, 2013 installation in Palo Alto.

And, now that spring has sprung, is how is that garden growing? So far, I’m more than happy to say, it seems to be growing quite well. Personally, I’ve been overjoyed to see the permanent installation of Charlie Gadekan’s Aurora, a project built from a not-inconsequential amount of my own blood, sweat and tears (not to mention two fingernails), in front of Palo Alto’s City Hall, in part due to the support of the Burning Man Project and Black Rock Arts Foundation. We’re currently working to place another piece, though (elusive hand wave) the details of that effort are not yet ripe for public consumption. But on a larger scale, the effort that most crucially bears mentioning is The Downtown Project, the brainchild of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, to which I alluded last fall.

As I write this, a friend of mine is in Las Vegas giving a talk on urban innovation through CatalystCreativ’s monthly speaker series, Catalyst Week, in partnership with the Downtown Project. Last month, a different friend who helped start and now heads up an all-woman art and empowerment brigade, spoke. The “Community and Events” section of the project’s website offers a calendar featuring a never-ending stream of cocktail hours, trivia nights, speaker series, first Friday artwalks (a feature of downtown Vegas even before the project’s presence) and other worthy-sounding forays. 

Yet despite these efforts at programming – just one example among many initiatives the Downtown Project has undertaken – Tony Hsieh recently came under fire for dropping “community” from the project’s official mission, altering not only the slogan “community, co-learning, collisions” to include “connectedness” instead, but also dropping talk of a return on community from the project's website. 

When questioned by tech and business journal Vegas INC, Hsieh’s answer touched on the essential paradox of trying to do good in the real world, with real money.

In the past, we used the word 'community' a lot more, but we learned that a lot of people misinterpreted or misunderstood our goals. We’ve even wondered if maybe we should have chosen a different name for the company. With a name like ‘Downtown Project,’ we've found that a lot of people no longer view us as another business or developer that will coexist amongst many other businesses and developers, but instead there are a lot of people that seem to expect us to address and solve every single problem that exists in a city (for example, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health).

He continues,

Downtown Project is a startup entrepreneurial venture that happens to also have good intentions, and due to limited resources, we unfortunately aren't able to address and solve every single problem that exists in a city. We are also not a charity or nonprofit. We believe that financial self-sustainability creates the greatest chance for our investment impact to be long-term, which is why we invest in small businesses and entrepreneurs. We found that when we used the word 'community,' there were a lot of groups that suddenly expected us to donate money to them or invest in them just because they lived in the community or because it was for a good cause. People would be upset if donating or investing in them did not happen to fit in with our priorities and business goals, and they would refer back to our use of the word ‘community.’

Is this answer an easy out, turning its back on the lofty goals that gained Hsieh such widespread attention at the project’s outset? Some might feel so, but more likely, it’s just a symptom of idealism (not so much Hsieh’s, which was likely already tempered with a healthy sense of reality, given his past success as a businessman, but rather, everyone else’s) bumping up against real-world challenges. It’s simply a symptom of leaving the garden.

I’m one of many who see Burning Man as a sort of personal Eden, but I’m also someone with a healthy pragmatism regarding the compromises necessary to effect positive real-world change. As I root for initiatives like Hsieh’s to survive and thrive, I nonetheless feel the pain of “eating the fruit.” 

A frequent Burner aphorism is that “last year was better” — a statement meant not just to humble or shame newcomers or keep outsiders at bay — It’s a statement of fact. Nothing can compare with the experience of descending on the desert for the first time, virginal, completely open and innocent, yet somehow fully at home.   

Homouroboros: the snake, the apple, good and evil 

Peter Hudson offers insight to his 2007 stroboscopic masterpiece Homouroboros.

My first year was the debut year of Peter Hudson’s zoetrope homouroboros, and it remains, to this day, my favorite Burning Man installation ever. Nothing will ever compare to the deep resonance I felt with Hudson’s wit, his craft, his overall vision. Does this mean it’s the best piece ever to grace the desert? Of course not – or rather, who could say? It just means that that was the moment of my eating of the fruit. I was educated, for better or for worse, and things wouldn't ever be the same.

What happened to me is happening to the Burning Man and festival community as a whole. We’re coming to reckon with having experienced the pinnacle; we're leaving paradise, and we’re making our way into the real world. It’s not always easy to trade in blissful idealism, even isolation, for the messy, dirty, often paradoxical trade-offs of the real world, but it’s definitely part of moving forward.

We can pretend we have no knowledge of good and evil, or we can use that knowledge to make the best possible choices available to us in a world that runs, at least for now, according to the laws of money and power.

This is just a brief introduction, and I have plenty more to say on the topics of money, investment and social entrepreneurship, especially as it relates to the festival culture, but I’ve just looked at the clock and realized that it’s time for me to go get messy and dirty myself: less than a week till we pack up for Coachella!

What a long, strange trip it's been . . .

They say it takes seven years for every cell in your body to turn over. In astrology, 27 years is the period of the Saturn Return, something that was brought to my attention recently as I prepared to finish up my 27th year on this planet — an event that coincided almost perfectly with the realization, incidentally, that it had been seven years since I took a leave of absence from school and came to the Bay Area to study . . . other things.

What’s changed since then? In some ways, a lot, and in some ways, not much at all. I still work with many of the same artists and entrepreneurs I met when I first tumbled off the Greyhound Bus in Oakland. Many of them are still my closest friends. And many of them are still struggling with the same issues of what of means to be a creative person in the urban landscape as when I first set foot in their world.

Recently, an article published by economist Richard Florida, who edits Atlantic Cities, caused me to revisit my opinions on his theories about the creative class and how it interacts with the city. Writing that post inspired me to look up a piece I’d written shortly after returning to school – when I was still just getting to know the scene out here in the Bay Area – for a round table discussion about Urban Landscapes in America.

Surprising or not, the piece is just as relevant as it was when it was first written, despite (or maybe because of) the major economic reshuffling of the past few years.

Falling property values in much of the country have caused Florida to pull what many consider an about face from earlier writings touting the economic benefits of attracting artists, bohemians and creative workers to cities. Summing up the ways in which the crash will reshape America, Florida wrote, "We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try."

Critics took his words to be a death sentence for  cities – even those that had bought into the creative class meme – already facing decline. Meanwhile, land values in places like San Francisco have remained high and are unlikely to drop at any point in the near future, meaning that gentrification will continue to sweep through poor neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, and culturally attractive neighborhoods alike. Does this mean a nation in which Florida's theories are no longer relevant, with growth continuing in already-bustling cities and decay the inevitable fate of contracting cities, regardless of where the creative class plants itself?

Quite the contrary. 

The main thrust of Florida's creative class theory is toward the development of profitable districts. He capitalizes on counterculture (the creative core) as a one-time resource to be mined and consumed in the building of attractive new urban environments for those who generate economic activity (the creative class). Here and elsewhere, I've challenged such a reductive view of the role creativity plays in cities by applying a 'renewable resource' metaphor, positing that creativity is part of a healthy urban ecosystem whose value is ongoing, integrated, and generative. Commodification of creative culture ultimately sterilizes it, while undermining and disabling those who generate it. Extracted all at once, it ceases to be a functional component of the urban ecosystem, building and storing human capital, digesting old into new, and contributing to a cyclical regeneration and invigoration of the landscape.

Worrying about whether creativity will provide an immediate bump to a shrinking urban economy feels dangerously like jumping back into old patterns – particularly the impulsion towards high-cost, transportation-intensive, low-density, single-family home ownership – which, despite proving to be destructive, have typically been measures of growth and progress.

In the wake of a crisis created by over-speculation, maintaining diverse urban eco-systems is key. The true value in Florida's creative class theory is not the shallow and mercenary conclusion that artists create hip, edgy neighborhoods ripe for development, but the underlying recognition that creative people, well, create. They come up with new forms, new synergies and new ways of using space – a useful characteristic in an expanding economy (as Florida's books are testament) but an even more crucial function when the economy is contracting. For places struggling, my message is: don't give up, give creativity full rein. 

In the study of evolution there is a concept called punctuated equilibrium, popularized by Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of fossil findings at the Burgess Shale. The theory argues that speciation – the development of new life forms – does not happen along a slow, gradual path, but rather, it occurs in short bursts following major environmental stressors. If the same holds true in cities, then reserving 'petri dish' neighborhoods, and space in all  neighborhoods, where new forms can incubate is particularly crucial following economic catastrophe, when pressure is sure to push innovation. Or, to put it more simply, as Florida does in quoting the Stanford economist Paul Romer,“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” 

Instead of just focusing on what generates dollars, new buildings, and more business, we should also focus on what generates livability and happiness — with equity, social justice, and sustainability as measures. Rather than struggling to keep building and growing in an unfriendly economic climate, we should take the time to discover the new ideas and efficiencies that will make cities, the second time around, more stable, diverse, engaging places. To me, this is the value of the creative people I live with, work with, and write about. And it is at its most valuable when it exists in natural symbiosis with the city around it - poor, rich, professional and not – rather then being shuffled endlessly to make room for the next most profitable urban monoculture.

Of course, close readers of this blog (and much of the Bay Area art scene) will already know that creative people do tend to generate value wherever they go — Dan and Karen, for instance, did in fact move out of their Hunters Point studio to take over the American Steel Building. Dan has since gone on to found Big Art Labs in Los Angeles, and under Karen’s direction, American Steel Studios has grown to a six acre facility housing more than 150 tenants engaged in art and entrepreneurship of all flavors. Meanwhile, Lennar lost the ‘49s contract to Santa Clara, but still broke ground (“officially” this summer, though work has been going on for years) on the extravagant new development that will reshape Hunters Point, and much of the city, by extension. Oakland, as chronicled elsewhere in this blog, is assimilating more and more artists, while struggling to mitigate the pressures of gentrification. The artists of the Hunters Point Shipyard continue to fight eviction and relocation in the face of development. And the Box Shop, run by Charles Gadekan, is not only hanging on but thriving – in fact, its lease was just renewed for another 8 years.

Every day, the landscape and culture of the Bay Area continues to challenge and affirm the creative individuals here. While sometimes the evolution is hard to swallow, even to a relative newcomer like myself — I have mixed feelings, for instance, about the photos of the Symbiosis Gathering plastered across the pages of Rolling Stone, and even though I am totally one of them, it’s easy to be annoyed with the ever-increasing waves of writers and designers camped out on laptops in coffeeshops — there is no denying that it’s always interesting. All in all, it’s a good time to be an artist in the Bay Area.