Overcoming Burning Man FOMO

Missing the world's greatest party yet again

I am not going to Burning Man this year. I made the decision months ago. I felt tempted to reverse it in the last few weeks as last-minute tickets started popping up. I am currently fighting furious FOMO, but will remain stalwart.

My involvement with Burning Man goes back a long way. I first went in 2000, on assignment for Rolling Stone. For Rolling Stone, I wrote “The Fire This Time,” probably the first serious coverage (not just mocking it as some drug-fueled hippie fest) in a major magazine. It was an amazing way to attend the event, as I had carte blanche to interview the funders, organizers, musicians, and artists. I met so many wonderful, brilliant people. I was amazed, in awe. I made it my mission to go back every year.

I wrote about Burning Man in Breaking Open the Head (2002), noting: 

“Burning Man is more decadent than Warhol’s Factory, more glamorous than Berlin in the 1920s, more ludicrous than the most lavish Busby Berkeley musical, more of a love-fest than Pepperland, more anarchic than Groucho Marx’s Freedonia, more implausible than any mirage.

The festival rewires your sense of what is possible now.”

My description of Burning Man in that book certainly inspired many people — hundreds, at least — to make the pilgrimage there. 

In 2003, I published “Heat of the Moment: The Art and Culture of Burning,” the first essay for a serious art magazine to take Burning Man seriously as an art movement. I was able to shoehorn this essay into the hyper-elitist pages of ArtForum. My editor received so much negativity about what I wrote, once it appeared, that I was blackballed from the magazine after that.

Here are two excerpts from my ArtForum piece: 

“Nobody would say that all of the art on the playa is good. In Black Rock City, however, “bad taste” is not denigrated—even failures can be recycled into future fabulosity. From Hello Kitty to Aztec temples, from fairy wings to Minimalism, the stylistic sampling of Burning Man, like the sampling of certain contemporary DJs, suggests a stance beyond aesthetic judgment. In this context, artworks become experiential tools, not final statements or museum pieces. When the work has been experienced, the object that catalyzed the experience can be liberated through its destruction. It doesn’t matter how much time, energy, and skill has been lavished on the object. The point is not to cling to that shell, that structure, but to evolve from it. If Burning Man is a cult, it is above all a cult of transformation.”

[Perhaps it is not surprising, in retrospect, that the art world, a cult of fetishized commodities, was not thrilled with this concept¹]