The Muddy Schadenfreude of Burning Man
Why so many love to hate the dusty festival (reboot for 2025)
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Burning Man festival opened this week, and right on cue, the media has begun its annual round of disaster dispatches. The last time I attended, in 2017, a huge dust storm hit just as we celebrated the wedding of two close friends, making it feel like a party on another planet. The news that year reported on the "hellish conditions" and predicted it would be the festival’s last. In 2023, another storm hit, prompting grim headlines, while my friends on the ground were having the time of their lives, which led me to write about the disconnect between Burning Man’s reality and its perception, and why it’s the festival that everyone (who hasn’t been) loves to hate.
This was originally a paid post, but I’m opening it up and resharing it today as a free newsletter.
This week, America has come together in a collective schadenfreude of Burning Man. The festival became the latest victim of global warming, which turned the desert into a muddy bath and required the 70,000 participants to shelter in place. But more vicious than the torrential rains turned out to be the journalists, writers, and all kinds of disgruntled intellectuals, whose thinly veiled disgust of the event has finally found an outlet. In a heartwarming case of media unity, publications of opposite political leanings joined forces in a gleeful stoning of the “infamous sex-and-drug-fueled festival in the Nevada desert”. (NY Post)
"The annual festival is widely known for its "Orgy Dome," drug presence, and extravagant—and skimpy—outfits," is how the NY Post describes Burning Man, which is the kind of investigative reporting I expect from the media outlet. Another article this week, a CNN opinion piece, used prettier language — “a radically elevated sense of self coupled with profound shallowness and narcissism masquerading as creativity,” before chiming in with the NY Post about the participants "heading out to the desert to do drugs, have orgies, and set things on fire."
A prominent New York Magazine art critic trolled on Instagram: "70,000 people "stranded" in the desert. It IS only a six-mile walk to the closest town. That is, at most, only a two-hour walk; I walk a little faster than that.” Almost a thousand commentators cheered him on, asking, "Does anyone feel sorry for these people?"
I wasn’t one of those people this year, but I attended Burning Man festival seven times, from 2008 to 2017. On one hand, I am not the typical burner (a title I despise) the media describes. I don’t believe in astrology, nor am I vegan, have dreads or tattoos. I am neither spiritual nor an influencer nor a tech bro. With a group of like-minded friends, we come for the whole week, build a camp from scratch, sleep in tents, and clean up the area with not a single cigarette butt left on site. We bring everything we needed with us — water, food, medication — and build a shower, a dome, a fire pit, a kitchen, and a waffle stand to feed passerby breakfast. The experience is giddy fun, but it is not easy. Inhospitable climate — stupid hot during the day, freezing at night, constant sandstorms that get into your eyes and inside the skin of your feet till they crack, lack of proper sleep in the shaky tents, porta potties of hell — all make for some of the toughest weeks of my life. Still, I returned for six more years.
Describing Burning Man as a drug-fueled orgy is as ignorant a statement as Fox News labeling New York City a liberal cesspool of crime. There are fewer orgies going on at any point in Burning Man than at a Republican convention, the sandy environment being too inhospitable for such a complicated operation. There is an Orgy Dome (I took a peek inside once, it was empty), but there are also daycare centers, math camps, and physics lectures. And yes, there are drugs. Mostly weed, molly, and acid. But few people drag their belongings into the desert with the single-minded intention of getting high. There are families with kids and grandparents, and during the day, Burning Man resembles a huge sandbox rather than a drug-infused sex party.
There is also art. The prominent New York Magazine critic, whose biting art reviews I enjoy, has been as dismissive of Burning Man art in past Instagram posts, as he is about trekking for 2+ hours in the mud without taking any of your belongings with you (he would be much more livid if people did just that, leaving their things behind as trash). That betrays an uninformed opinion. There are hundreds of art installations at the festival, ranging from ornamental trinkets to massive architectural projects. In terms of good-to-bad ratio, Burning Man fares better than most Chelsea galleries, but the prevalence of blinking lights and the lack of virtue-signaling artist statements pigeonhole all the art as low-brow entertainment. The installations are site-specific and interactive, making them infinitely more engaging than similar objects (also with blinking lights, but ironically) found in the sterile space of a gallery with a strict "Don’t Touch" policy. Over the years, I have experienced incredible art, like Richard Serra-like Gravity Stones, a 180,000-pound sculpture with giant granite slabs suspended diagonally in midair. Climbing on the 15,000-pound stone creates a feeling of weightlessness by shifting the perception of gravity and space.
What disqualifies the most vocal Burning Man critics is that none of them have actually been there. They are regurgitating the same tidbits full of misinformed indignation. "A promise of rugged self-reliance only enabled by access to tremendous resources" continues the CNN opinion piece, making a judgment about people stuck in the mud from the comfort of the writer’s air-conditioned home: "lofty ambitions and the performance of significance but very little in the way of actual depth, morality, or greater purpose.” Grand words from a person getting their information from social media.
Demanding a moral purpose from an art and dance festival is a facetious ask. Yet it exists in a way that is hard to understand from photos or third-person accounts. The sheer scale of the event is impossible to translate. The festival stretches beyond the horizon, transforming itself into Black Rock City and becoming the third-largest town in Nevada. The massive, elaborate wooden structures, like the Man itself and the Temple, take months to build, a week to enjoy, and a night to burn. The enormous effort, time, and resources focused on no other reason than play, create a sense of freedom and optimism that I haven’t experienced in any other space. Despite the harsh environment and physical discomfort, I came back to Burning Man, year after year to recycle the stress, work, and obligations of the past 12 months, and every time I left a bit kinder and more grounded.
The naysayers of Burning Man, turned social warriors, cite the wealthy influencers with "tremendous resources" as their reason for bashing the event. Out of 70,000 participants, the festival attracts all kinds of people, including those who are filthy rich, famous, and ridiculously, ridiculously good looking. But for 95% of the rest of us, who build everything from scratch and then take it down by hand, the statement is ludicrous.
I am under no rosy illusions about Burning Man. It has its share of problems that are getting exacerbated as more people descend on its desert grounds, leaving behind trash and clogging local roads. There is the unfortunate Burning Man photo dump that begins right after the festival is over, burying Instagram feed in a landslide of generic outfits studded with feathers as "radical self-expression.” And there are those who call themselves Burners in earnest, and talk about their week in the desert with a certain combination of smugness and faux spirituality that make even the most generous soul shudder. These are the issues of any event that grows beyond its original intent, and at some point, it will have to change form or reach an inevitable dead end. I am okay with that. What I am not okay with is the bashing of a festival from the sidelines and shoving 70,000 people under one sparkly Instagram umbrella.
Most of us come to Burning Man to be bewildered. Being surrounded by intricate feats of imagination, created with enormous effort for no other purpose than play and destroyed right after, activates a magical sense of wonder and belonging, even for a cynic like me. That is worth all the dust, the long hours in line, the tremendous labor, and the lack of sleep.
There is a greater purpose to the festival, and it is not one of privilege or entitlement. It is an opportunity to reset and recycle from the rigid continuum of daily life, and, as Bryan Ferry sang, to “have a really, really good time.”
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Thanks for your thoughtful post, and terrific photos. I've never been, but as James Taylor put it in "Mexico," "I never really been so I don't really know ... I never really been but I'd sure like to go."
Terrific images. “Critics from the sidelines.” Hits the mark.