The event might easily be double or triple the size save its cap on yearly admission.īurning Man’s shock to my conceptions of art and human potential has compelled me to attend for 16 of the past 17 years (I skipped 2015). This summer, some 75,000 made the annual pilgrimage, creating, for one week, the tenth largest urban center in Nevada. It moved to the desert in 1990, where it kept expanding. The event began with a few hundred people on a beach in San Francisco and celebrated its 30th birthday this past Labor Day weekend. The shock has been permanent-my desire for more of it remains addictive.Īs most will likely know by now, Burning Man is a weeklong arts festival that takes place in the Black Rock desert of Nevada. It rewired my sense of what human beings are capable of. The festival expanded my sense of what art was and could be.

Burning Man impacted me in a different way. It had never occurred to me that such deplorable kitsch could become objects of aesthetic contemplation. Koons’s “Banality” sculptures horrified and fascinated me with their vacant pop culture glamor. I have only felt that delectable, euphoric “shock of the new” twice in my life: when I saw the first exhibit of Jeff Koons’s porcelain and wood sculptures at the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo in 1988, and when I went to Burning Man for the first time in 2000. The dismay they caused quickly turned to admiration and accolades. For over a century, a central basis of art has been what critic Robert Hughes termed “the shock of the new.” Modern art has taught its followers to yearn for subversion and disruption, the undermining of anything they believe an artwork to be: Marcel Duchamp’s upside-down urinal, Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, Jackson Pollock’s dismissal of any figure-ground relationship by splattering paint directly on the canvas.

Art of Burning Man by N.K. Guy