Art Installations : Your Art on the Playa / Bookmark

A very interesting page about a gathering that can be quite challenging, in both a good and a bad way ...

I'm decidely ambivalent about Burning Man, as an event, though less so about Burning Man as a cultural phenomenon. When somebody writes in a review of my Green Tortoise journal (old location) that "From his description one could conclude that GT is run by sociopaths and BM is run by people who enable sociopaths." that's a very accurate summary. In my experience, while a lot of very nice people went to Burning Man, the organizers themselves are a nasty bunch, which I suspect may be one of the reasons for the event's long, slow and sad decline, as good people were driven off. But there were some very interesting ideas that got explored along the way, and some beautiful sites created, ideas that deserve to be studied and maybe revisited. Interactive Art is something that I think that we could use more of in American society, in which going on and "doing something" on the weekend has had a way of really meaning "going out and passively looking at something", and not noticing that along the way, not a single lasting memory has been made. Burning, when it has worked, has been a remedy for that. It has been far from being a perfect remedy for a number of reasons, the nearly ubiquitous drug use being one obvious reason, and an even more basic one being the failure, as a return of the notion of folk art has been encouraged, to foster the most fundamental driving force behind real, traditional folk art: the incremental accumulation of tradition that occurs as each builds on what others have created before him, until the once seemingly ordinary takes on mythic force. But one need not emulate the failures of a would-be subculture to learn from the creations of that would-be subculture, and this, perhaps, is the thought one should keep in mind as one visits the Burning Man site.