Art and cooperation, the sparks for an ongoing phenomenon. Excerpt from Inforum’s “Burning Man: A Conversation with the Founder,” July 19, 2011
LARRY HARVEY, Founder, Burning Man
JOSH McHUGH, CEO, Attention Span Media; President, Inforum Board
McHUGH: Tell us a little bit about your new headquarters and why [you made] the move into the heart of San Francisco.
HARVEY: We saw real estate values dropping precipitously, which allowed us to move into Market Street. The city had encouraged us to do so, because they’re very much interested in revitalizing mid-Market, which is essentially part of the Tenderloin. We think there are a lot of opportunities to do what we do best. We build a city every year in the desert, and we know something about making urban environments vital. We plan to do some radical things. Given the present political mood, people are open to new ideas. That’s true across the country. Our “burners,” as they’re called, are being asked to come into the centers of various cities right now. Of course, in the usual pattern, the artists are invited in, and as soon as things get better, they’re escorted out. But it might be possible to break that cycle.
We just founded a new nonprofit. We have the Black Rock Arts Foundation, which is dedicated to spreading interactive, collaborative art throughout the world. Now we’re founding the Burning Man Project, destined eventually to absorb the event itself. We’re going to give it away. I think this is a wonderful opportunity. It’s interested in everything. The thing about Burning Man, when you look at the variety of people that go there, and all the normal boundaries are down between every department of human knowledge and endeavor, if you ask what possible application the culture we’ve created out in the desert might have to the world, the question is, What wouldn’t it have an application to? Education, urban planning, disaster relief, as well as art. Needless to say, we’re ambitious and we think we can affect the course of things.
McHUGH: How does it stack up to the average city as far as number of injuries and such in that period of time?
HARVEY: It’s a remarkably safe place, actually. There’s no pavement. And you can’t drive your car. That eliminates most injuries right there. We have emergency response times that would be the envy of any city that size. We’re very well organized. There’s some typical injuries, but they’re pretty minor. As long as you drink water, you’re probably going to be OK. There’s not a lot of criminal activity. Everyone is really overprovided for, because people, to meet the survival challenge, overprovide, so there’s this superfluousness of goods that people end up giving one another things.
McHUGH: Can you talk a little bit more about that factor where there is an abundance of goods, and the economic system that exists up there? One of things that you once said was that commerce is not in and of itself the enemy.
HARVEY: To be against commerce is to be against your shorts, your shoes, your shirt. Hunter-gatherers engage in commerce. We just said that we live in a world that’s been overly commodified, in which every value has been turned into a commodity value, and people don’t have identities. It’s a world full of brands and no identity, a world where you can go about and do your business using your credit card and ATMs and never really look anyone in the eye. A world in which things have been commodified that never should have been commodified, because everybody knows that the most essential things you can’t put a price on. You can’t put a price on love, on the things that make life meaningful. But we live in a world that has done that. The 21st century is going to be about resources and competing, and there’s not enough, not in a consumer world where there’s no limit on appetite.
It’s a philosophic position. We just thought it would be interesting for people to live in a world, as people did at the beginning of the modern world and for all centuries before, where things weren’t relentlessly commodified as they are in our world. The market hadn’t made inroads on the process of culture. It hadn’t replaced community. We just thought people should live in an environment where nothing’s bought and sold, just to see what that’s like. When everyone is giving, people begin to have experiences that are simply revelatory. They begin to feel like their life has meaning, they begin to feel that they’re in touch with that unconditional reality, which perhaps in their youth they identified as life’s goal, when they thought the world might be like their family. It creates this world that’s just saturated with meaningful encounter. Of course, then there’s what Coco Chanel said: The best things in life are priceless, but the next best things cost a lot of money.
McHUGH: A lot of the leading engineers and innovators in the technology industries tend to meet each other at Burning Man or tend to recognize kindred spirits. The most famous case of that is Eric Schmidt meeting with the founders of Google up there. What is it that makes Burning Man such a haven for that kind of connection?
HARVEY: Think about the culture of Silicon Valley. So much of the tech industry is project-based learning. I think Google gives people time off just to do what they want to do, and the company ends up owning it, but they give them time to explore outside of the framework of this more structured enterprise. Burning Man from the very beginning has been project-based learning. You’ve got potentially encyclopedic knowledge assembled in this place. Scholarship is fine and the academic model can be useful for certain things, but human beings tend to learn through engaging through project-based learning.
McHUGH: Is there a conscious strategy for longevity, that you’ve said, Hey, if this thing [Burning Man] is going to last 20 years, we’ve got to do these three things?
HARVEY: No, but we did remain true to our experience. The whole gifting thing started because people were just sharing things, and it would have been inappropriate and in bad taste to sell anything. Then one day somebody showed up, after we’d grown a little bit larger, and was vending fireworks. Then they discreetly went off a ways so they could do it out of sight. We didn’t think it was evil, we just thought it was tacky. We just stay true to that sort of thing. It would be too much to expect that we said, “Well, we’ll make it completely non-commercial. That’s how we’re going to bond people to our brand.” Not even Rupert Murdoch would come up with an idea like that. We just did that because that seemed to be what made us feel good. Now, with the Burning Man Project, my partners and I are thinking beyond our lifetimes. It is a bit of a legacy project, which is a very interesting exercise. We’re saying: 100 years. And that’s interesting, because if you do that, it makes you think differently about the present. What would make something that durable, what would keep it alive that long? We’ve been alive and grown for a quarter century, so it doesn’t sound like hubris to imagine an entire century, and now we’re in a position of founding an institution that will house and generate culture and function as a community. How we can ensure that it won’t be perverted or subject to internal divisions or perish? That’s a really good exercise too. Start thinking about doing something that lasts for 100 years without you.
McHUGH: Burning Man has expanded obviously from San Francisco and Nevada and has spread throughout the world. One thing that’s interesting is the Burners Without Borders initiative that happened [in the wake of Hurricane Katrina].
HARVEY: It was very spontaneous. People just left the event and knew what you needed in disasters because they’d been building big things out in this wilderness without any resources. They knew heavy equipment, they understood diesel, they understood water and all that. They just went down there to Mississippi and started doing things, the project, and ended up rebuilding houses, a Buddhist temple that had blown away in the hurricane. It ended up as an entrepot that FEMA wasn’t even capable of organizing.
All of that done very nimbly and on impulse. Joan Baez was there that year singing “Amazing Grace.” People started a fund. That was just the beginning. We fed their efforts. But this is the Burning Man twist. Being who they were and the culture they’d come out of, at the end of each day – the landscape was just strewn with debris, you’ve seen the pictures, unimaginable – they’d gather up the debris and at night they’d turn it into art and throw it on a bonfire, because that’s part of our culture. Then the locals started coming round. Pretty soon they were making art out of the crumbled ruin of their lives and throwing it on the fire. FEMA’s not going to do that for you. Now it’s gone on to do other things around the world, and that came out of Burning Man, this wild, crazy, dissolute party, supposedly. That’s just but one example of hundreds. That’s food for thought.
