What Is Burning Man, and Why Have Paris Hilton and Elon Musk Shown Up?

“Think about a hallucinogenic state honest,” the reporter Rick Marin wrote about Burning Man in The New York Instances in 2000.

The article described an surroundings of countercultural revelry, the place hippies and Silicon Valley sorts lower unfastened in environment paying homage to each “Mad Max” and Cirque du Soleil.

However this 12 months’s pageant, held in a distant desert in Nevada, has been a really totally different scene. The occasion was pummeled by rain that started on Friday evening, leaving thousands of attendees trapped and coping with thick sludge. With restricted entry to the location, attendees have been informed to preserve meals and water. The police are investigating the dying of 1 participant.

The intense situations have challenged the free-spirited ambiance that has lengthy been central to Burning Man’s attract. Under is a have a look at the origins and improvement of the pageant.

What’s Burning Man?

Burning Man is a nine-day celebration of artwork and self-expression held in Black Rock Metropolis, a brief neighborhood about 120 miles north of Reno, Nev. The pageant, which has drawn round 70,000 folks lately, is held on the finish of every summer season and culminates within the burning of a towering wood sculpture formed like a person — therefore its identify.

What’s the pageant often like?

Attendees, who name themselves Burners, describe the pageant as an train in creativity and neighborhood constructing. Organizers have additionally described it as “an excuse to get together within the desert.”

The occasion takes place on the playa, a dusty minicity with streets splayed out like a clock’s face with the wood determine at its middle. In contrast to Coachella, Burning Man has no headliner or scheduled invoice of performers. Burners do their very own development, together with lodging and colossal artwork installations. They use a system based mostly on presents, relatively than cash, to trade items.

“It’s an experiment in participatory, decommodified, self-expressive tradition,” mentioned Benjamin Wachs, who wrote “The Scene That Grew to become Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Train Us About Constructing Higher Communities” beneath the pen identify Caveat Magister. “All of the booze is free, besides perhaps you must sing a tune or provide up a poem or one thing.”

The freewheeling perspective of the pageant can be related to nudity, intercourse and drug use. A lot of the 16 arrests on the occasion final 12 months have been for drug possession, according to The Reno Gazette Journal.

How did Burning Man start?

Burning Man began as a more modest gathering in June 1986, when the founders Larry Harvey and Jerry James held a bonfire with pals on Baker Seashore in San Francisco. They burned an eight-foot-tall wood determine, the legend goes, to mark the tip of a romantic relationship. A crowd of roughly 35 people gathered to observe it burn.

The occasion was held yearly at Baker Seashore till fireplace marshals intervened in 1990. That 12 months it moved to Black Rock Desert, the place 350 revelers gathered to burn a 40-foot effigy, in keeping with the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that organizes the pageant. By the 2000s, the occasion had grown right into a dayslong desert rave that often drew greater than 50,000 attendees together with tech moguls and celebrities.

The fashionable pageant is organized across the “10 Principles,” a sequence of pointers that have been launched by Mr. Harvey in 2004. They embrace “radical inclusion,” which says there are not any stipulations for becoming a member of the neighborhood, and “leaving no hint,” which requires the members to depart the desert clear.

Who attends?

The pageant attracts a mixture of devoted Burners and new revelers every year, with a curious mix of tech moguls, influencers and celebrities.

Paris Hilton was a D.J. there in 2017. Mark Zuckerberg has attended, as has Elon Musk, who has proven up nearly yearly for the final 20 years (although there have been no indicators of him at this 12 months’s pageant). The music producer Diplo posted on X, previously often known as Twitter, that he had escaped this 12 months’s pageant by strolling 5 miles within the mud.

How a lot does it value?

Tickets to Burning Man cost $575, though CNBC estimated that the whole expertise can end up costing about $1,500 with lodging, journey and apparel.

How has the pageant modified over time?

In response to a survey conducted annually by pageant volunteers, the common Burner is getting older (the common age final 12 months was 37, in contrast with 32 in 2013) and wealthier. Attendees are nonetheless largely white, in keeping with the survey, with 13 p.c figuring out themselves as folks of coloration.

The inflow of rich attendees — a few of whom have brought in chefs and air-conditioning — has induced some longtime Burners to bemoan a lack of the pageant’s D.I.Y. ethos.

The pageant had encountered hurdles earlier than this 12 months. It was held nearly in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The pageant final 12 months passed off amid excessive warmth and mud, and environmental activists blockaded the entrance to this 12 months’s gathering.

Burners are often ready for tough situations, Mr. Wachs mentioned, however to not this diploma. “I do suppose that local weather change is creating an surroundings the place that is going to turn out to be unpredictably tougher,” he added.