As most will likely know by now, Burning Man is a weeklong arts festival that takes place in the Black Rock desert of Nevada. The event began with a few hundred people on a beach in San Francisco and celebrated its 30th birthday this past Labor Day weekend. It moved to the desert in 1990, where it kept expanding. 25,400 people were there in 2000. This summer, some 75,000 made the annual pilgrimage, creating, for one week, the tenth largest urban center in Nevada. The event might easily be double or triple the size save its cap on yearly admission.

Burning 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). I fell in love with its giant sculptures and installations, which are scattered across the enormous blank canvas of the windblown desert—and are mostly reduced to ash in the event’s final days. At Burning Man, you don’t just admire the art, you become part of it. On the playa, I have chased a gigantic white whale art car in a 17th-century schooner, ridden golden dragons to secret cabarets inside of massive dice cubes, slept on shag carpets beneath a forest of white rustling plastic strips, and witnessed dozens of purple, luminous dawns from ziggurats and pyramids. I’ve had a million other peak moments now lost or half-forgotten in the shifting sands of time.



Magnificent as many of the sculptures and constructions I explored were, I rarely considered them to be unique artworks made by talented individuals or local collectives. The festival seemed like one collective art expression, a coalescence of a shared vision among many individuals and communities that gets expressed in the artworks, the costumes, the design of individual camps, and the overall layout of the city: a vast semi-circle laid out like a clock, rather than the rectangular grid of many modern metropolises. In this way, Burning Man is similar to what Richard Wagner described in the 1850s as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art” that uses and combines any and all other art forms to affect all of the senses, becoming more than the sum of its parts.