Burning Man needs a competitor
Monopolies tend to stifle innovation. It's true whether the monopoly is making software or radical-self-reliance festivals.
Burning Man is currently the best place for large-scale artists to exhibit their creative energies in a way that tens of thousands of people will see it. It may have increased the total creative and artistic output of California, but it's also captured most of that creative energy. I can't think of a single friend who's worked on a large art project in recent memory and *not* taken it to Burning Man. Their market share (in terms of their share of people's free-time creative energy and their devotees' use of limited vacation days) is high and constant.
Burning Man as an event is showing some signs of stagnation. It still churns out a quality product, but it's not taking radical steps to innovate and push the boundaries. I'm sure there are plenty of political realities I don't see because I'm not inside the upper echelons of the organization, but I'm surprised at how little has changed in the last five years.
In a way it's a bit hard to separate the governmental contribution of burningman from the huge volume of participant-generated content. Most of the large projects are funded by the curated art choices of the burningman organization, so even though they are not creating the projects, they are determining what shows up and where it's placed. There was a year when a group wanted to self-govern their own section of Burning Man, funding art projects in the area using donations and a voting system. Something interesting happened that year -- the art in both this renegade section AND in the main festival was substantially better.
This is why I think a full-scale competitor would do Burning Man some good.
There are some practical difficulties to launching a burningman competitor. It takes a long time to grow an event from ~100 people to ~50000 without enduring potentially catastrophic growing pains. So it's likely that the only event that could challenge Burning Man in the next decade is an existing, moderately-sized one.
Burning Man is currently the best place for large-scale artists to exhibit their creative energies in a way that tens of thousands of people will see it. It may have increased the total creative and artistic output of California, but it's also captured most of that creative energy. I can't think of a single friend who's worked on a large art project in recent memory and *not* taken it to Burning Man. Their market share (in terms of their share of people's free-time creative energy and their devotees' use of limited vacation days) is high and constant.
Burning Man as an event is showing some signs of stagnation. It still churns out a quality product, but it's not taking radical steps to innovate and push the boundaries. I'm sure there are plenty of political realities I don't see because I'm not inside the upper echelons of the organization, but I'm surprised at how little has changed in the last five years.
In a way it's a bit hard to separate the governmental contribution of burningman from the huge volume of participant-generated content. Most of the large projects are funded by the curated art choices of the burningman organization, so even though they are not creating the projects, they are determining what shows up and where it's placed. There was a year when a group wanted to self-govern their own section of Burning Man, funding art projects in the area using donations and a voting system. Something interesting happened that year -- the art in both this renegade section AND in the main festival was substantially better.
This is why I think a full-scale competitor would do Burning Man some good.
There are some practical difficulties to launching a burningman competitor. It takes a long time to grow an event from ~100 people to ~50000 without enduring potentially catastrophic growing pains. So it's likely that the only event that could challenge Burning Man in the next decade is an existing, moderately-sized one.