radical exclusivity?
Burning Man’s Cry for Help (NYT 3/30/12)
More than 10,000 tickets still remain for Burning Man, which culminates over Labor Day weekend. They were originally allotted for a public sale starting Mar. 28. Now, however, they will go only to handpicked attendees who “already have a relationship and contact points within the organization” of Burning Man.
In other words, Burning Man is building its own kind of caste system, choosing insiders and outsiders, curating the community’s most valuable members. Why does this matter?
We live in tremendously creative times. Thanks to the Internet, the tools to make and share art have proliferated. Offline, however, we’re still largely stuck in a culture where some people make art and other people consume it. There’s a dividing line between celebrities and fans, performers and spectators. How often do people get to co-create culture in the physical world?
For more than two decades, Burning Man has been the antithesis of the art establishment, avoiding the social stratifications created by fame and pedigree, embracing a credo of egalitarianism and “radical inclusion.” If you wanted to show your art there — even if your art was stale Twinkies stacked to look like Stonehenge, which I saw my first year — no curator would turn you away. Burning Man is the only American event of its scale that actively attempts a democratic system for face-to-face artistic exchange.
(i kind of don’t get the headline? where is the cry for help?)
(by the way, yes, we have tickets.)
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I interpreted it to be a cry for organizational help. Based on my experience of migrating my 20k online community, my brain blew up when I heard how complex the lottery system was … people cannot follow instructions and there were some COMPLEX instructions, and it seems that primarily scalpers and hoarders were motivated to figure it out.
Phish kidzzzzzz seem to be able to figure out COMPLEX ticket instructions pretty well.
@ariel – i think it’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever worked on the inside of BMHQ that they need organizational help.
@meowmix – yes, i know, and i said this many times when eveyone was bitching about the lottery system. i’ve done Phish lottery probably a dozen times. i lost in the lottery at least half of those times. but i almost always got a ticket somehow. except for those damn shows at the Greek!
i think the thing is here, when you lost in the Phish lottery you at least thought you had a chance to buy a ticket from Ticketbastard. but in this case, all the tickets that didn’t get alloted in the lottery are now being alloted internally, and so it’s kind of a closed pool except for the scalpers on stubhub. that makes the whole thing *seem* very exclusive. IS IT more exclusive than the Phish lottery system?
the feeling among my peeps is that if you know someone who knows someone who goes to burning man, you should be able to find a ticket. but the point of the article is – for those who AREN’T already connected, who might have been that brilliant, isolated artist who shows up from nowhere and builds the most amazing thing your dilated pupils have ever seen — that kind of person is not going to be there anymore.
The same sort of superiority pervades Phish people for exclusive shows. If you know enough of the right kind of people, you should be in. Oh hippies and their exclusivity no matter what the subsubculture!