What Is Burning Man?

What It Is

• Burning Man is an annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance. [Official statement]
• Imagine crossing the magnitude of Cecil B. DeMille with the fantasy of Salvador Dali. Brew under the unique auspicies of the Bay Area’s hardy, yogic, creative avante-garde. Throw in a large dose of MIT or Silicon Valley rocket science, let simmer with a pinch of Navada neon, and thn serve around a campfire setting defined by good ol’-fashioned camaradarie and cooperation, sans laptops or cell phones. [Rob Sidon, 2009]
• It’s both Heaven and Hell on Earth. [Mark Cidade, 2000]
• It’s like being in an animated Salvador Dali painting. [Mark Cidade, 2000]
• It’s like Woodstock, except everyone is a performer.[Mark Cidade, 2000]
• It’s the biggest week-long party in the world. [Some guy, BM2000]
• Basically, it is a community that is built up in the alkali desert of Nevada for a week every year, where free souls can express themselves pretty much however they see fit. [Michelle Montrose, 2000]
• ???the party–perhaps better described as an art happening? an alternative community?–is Burning Man, the week-long festival held annually around Labor Day. [Brian Doherty, 2000 ]
• Think of a complex gourmet dessert: it has cake, ice cream, frosting, maybe nuts or some other filling. Any given one of these you can describe, not completely, but adequately. Even if someone has had one or even all of the ingredients, they may not have had these ingredients, and there’s no way to tell them how this specific mix combined to form your particular experience. Each person must plunge a fork down the entire thing and taste it before they can tell what it’s like.
  Burning man is the same way. [Edward LeCouteur, 2000]
• It’s like tripping; If you haven’t been there, you don’t know the language. If you have, then there is nothing more to say. [Randal Alan Smith, 1999 ]
• A survivalist’s idea of a vacation? An art event? A 7-day rave? An excuse to perform spectacular pyrotechnics? I guess it depends on whom you ask. [Vince Constabileo, 1999]
• About 15.000 people (in 1998; our numbers increase greatly every year) gather for several days to express their artistic creativity, to loose [sic] their inhibitions and behave as weirdly as they feel like, to be friends with all of the other participants, and to play and party day and night. There are hundreds of theme camps, some of which must have taken a year to prepare. At most of them you can participate in some activity (creeping through a giant spiral ammonite whose corridor becomes narrower and narrower, receiving a relaxing massage, jumping a trampoline, having your body painted, getting henna tattoos that stay for three weeks, getting flogged with soothing soft foam rubber bars, doing various games, etc. etc.). [Rob van Glabbeek, 1998]
• The best description I can come up with is that it’s an an 8000 person performance art piece in which everyone participates. One way or another. [Matthew Kiwala, 1998]
• The best description I have come up with is “fun!” [Eric S., 1998]
• ???a project dedicated to discovering those optimal forms of community which will produce human culture in the conditions of our post-modern mass society. [Larry Harvey, 1997]
• It’s ritualistic, it’s anarchic, it’s primal, it’s a radical communal experiment, it’s art, it’s the death of art, it’s dream-like, it’s surreal, it’s creative, it’s destructive, it’s absurd, it’s spiritual, it’s real. Think of Burning Man as Disneyland turned inside out. [Victor Anderson, 1997 ]
• It’s just big happy crowds of harmless arty people expressing themselves and breaking a few pointless shibboleths that only serve to ulcerate young people anyway. [Bruce Sterling, 1996]

What It Ain’t

• It’s not a rave.
• It is neither vicarious nor anonymous. [Larry Harvey, 1997 (contrasting it with cyberspace)]
• It’s not scary, it’s not pagan, it’s not devilish or satanic. There’s no public orgies, nobody gets branded or hit with whips. Hell, it’s less pagan than the Shriners. [Bruce Sterling, 1996]