Burning Man doesn’t want you, dear readers of The Bold Italic. Don’t feel bad. It isn’t personal; it’s just that the country’s premier countercultural festival has become a victim of its own popularity, and it doesn’t want to attract anyone new who doesn’t really, really want to be there and contribute to the experiment.
That’s why you won’t see the Burning Man Project advertising the fact that registration to buy tickets to the event, which runs from August 30 to September 7, begins tomorrow, February 11 — and it’s why event organizers asked us not to write this article now.
“We aren’t interested in stimulating the ticket-registration process [on] Wednesday,” BMP board member Marian Goodell told me last week. “I don’t think it’s prudent to further feed the frenzy. It only makes the scarcity worse. We have fewer tickets available on the main sale, as more went to the directed sale, and the [US Bureau of Land Management] continues to constrain our population.”
The organization was even pretty tight lipped and restrictive about the directed group sale that took place on February 4, when 20,000 tickets were snapped up by established Burner camps and collectives. That insider sales system was hastily established in 2012 after tickets quickly sold out, raising concerns about whether the core attendees who build the temporary city and its artistic offerings would be able to attend. That feeding frenzy was triggered by the event selling out for the first time in its 26-year history in 2011 and people being worried whether they could get a ticket for 2012.
But with Burning Man continuing to capture the attention of the public and the press around the world, the fact that the lion’s share of the $390 tickets, 40,000, are going on sale February 18 is bound to make the social media rounds, with this article being just one more piece of shrapnel in Burning Man’s explosion into mainstream consciousness and desire.
The idea was that attendees would create the city and its offerings themselves, encouraging participation, shunning mere spectators, and creating an ethos that has become more challenging to maintain now that it’s on everyone’s bucket list, creating a demand that has increased exponentially in recent years.
Burning Man started in 1986 as a small gathering on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, where this celebration of free expression was adopted by the anarchist, culture-jamming Cacophony Society, which, in 1990, helped move it to its present home on federal public lands in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and run an event that has no commerce or sponsored stages or any of the usual festival trappings.
The idea was that attendees would create the city and its offerings themselves, encouraging participation, shunning mere spectators, and creating an ethos that has become more challenging to maintain now that it’s on everyone’s bucket list, creating a demand that has increased exponentially in recent years.
Burning Man’s current 2012–2016 permit from BLM caps this year’s population at 70,000, up from 68,000 last year, when the population officially peaked at 66,922. But BLM district manager Gene Seidlitz told me that 70,000 is the maximum number that the current environmental assessment supports, and that going beyond that would probably require a more detailed environmental-impact study, if that’s possible at all.
“We would have to take a hard look at a proposal that goes beyond 70,000. The highways and byways to and from the site are the limiting factor,” Seidlitz told us, referring to the bottleneck that keeps attendees stuck in traffic jams for several hours on end when arriving or leaving near peak times.
BLM officials manage the population and other aspects of Burning Man in close conjunction with event organizers, Seidlitz says, particularly after Burning Man exceeded the population cap of 50,000 in 2011 and 68,000 in 2013 and was placed on probation, which ended just last year.
So organizers are trying to tamp down demand by discouraging media coverage and expanding a ticket-registration system, hoping that that will somehow alleviate the clash between the event’s growing popular appeal and the natural and regulatory limits of its remote home on the playa.
Yet another one of those principles is radical inclusion (“Anyone can be a part of Burning Man”), which was heavily touted before the event last August, when there was a flurry of articles decrying how the event has become a playground for the rich and clueless, whose gated camps and hired sherpas seem to violate the principle of decommodification.
“We count on the event to bring new and engaged people to the experience, and those that have attended should be tuned into the communication tools available for information about the sale. This is one of the ways we encourage radical self-reliance,” Goodell said, that last phrase referring to one of the event’s 10 principles.
Yet another one of those principles is radical inclusion (“Anyone can be a part of Burning Man”), which is the one that Goodell and others heavily touted before the event last August, when there was a flurry of articles in the media decrying how the event has become a playground for the rich and clueless, whose gated camps and hired sherpas seem to violate the principle of decommodification and a few others on the list.
Among that coverage was a long story that I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian (for whom I covered Burning Man for years in reporting that went into my 2011 book, The Tribes of Burning Man) titled“Burning Man Jumps the Shark”, which questioned the way in which event organizers have rolled out a new nonprofit umbrella organization and whether the event’s runaway popularity undermines its countercultural ethos.
BMP officially acquired the company that runs the event, Black Rock City LLC, at the beginning of last year, although the same longtime board members continue to run the show for both. Conscious of the limits surrounding the main event, the new nonprofit strives to transcend that thing in the desert to create a global brand focused on regional events, projects, and artistic initiatives around the world.
The mission statement from the nonprofit’s just-released IRS Form 990, which outlines the relationship between the old and new organizations, reads “The mission of the Burning Man Project is to facilitate and extend the culture that has issued from the Burning Man event into the larger world.”
“Demand for tickets has outstripped supply since 2011, when the event first sold out. That’s partly why we’ve invested substantial time and resources in developing our nonprofit activities so that people across the globe have opportunities to engage with Burning Man, whether or not they ever go to Black Rock City.”
True-believer Burners can wax evangelical about Burning Man’s world-changing possibilities, although none of its projects or initiatives so far seem to come anywhere close to the appeal of the main event, with its storied history and spectacular high-desert setting. But that expansive mission is being driven more by the event’s limits than its larger cultural possibilities.
“Demand for tickets has outstripped supply since 2011, when the event first sold out,” Goodell told me. “That’s partly why we’ve invested substantial time and resources in developing our nonprofit activities so that people across the globe have opportunities to engage with Burning Man, whether or not they ever go to Black Rock City.”
That’s even putting the squeeze on the event’s regular attendees, including many longtime participants I talked to who are growing weary of jumping through new hoops. Even though most established camps were offered healthy allotments of tickets in the group sale this year, they needed to identify recipients by name in January, who then needed to be quick on the online draw at noon on a Wednesday because the 20,000 tickets sold out within an hour, leaving many camps without as many tickets as they needed.
Time will tell whether Burning Man’s dreams of world domination are wishful thinking by an organization experiencing growing pains, and whether more regional events and sponsored urban art projects can really substitute for rolling around in the dust in a state of wide-eyed wonderment for a week. Until then, expect lots of competition for your potential place on the playa.
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Photo by Steve Jurvetson/Flickr