Blogwitz

I decided not to go to Burning Man this year.

Between my dog being on hospice, moving living spaces two times in three months, a new job and nearly dying last year¹, going to Black Rock City just isn’t in my cards. My (not easy but absolutely clear) decision was made approximately exactly two weeks before Gate opens, and despite the offhand jokes I’d been hearing (“Burning Man tickets are the new zuccini”) I was feeling okay about selling my tickets and recouping the money I paid for them back in April.

I would soon find that this plan would not make it past the whiteboard stage. I logged on first thing in the morning to post my tickets and found the secondary market I’ve come to know over the years suddenly an unfamiliar trading floor jungle. Craigslist, Facebook and Stubhub were flooded with posts of desperate sellers offering their passes for far below what they paid for them². The market value of tickets had nearly halved, from $575 (not including fees) to around $300 or less (update 8/17: $213).

So, what’s going on?

It’s hard to know for sure, but an economic downturn, adverse weather forecasts and a Covid-19 surge all seem to be anecdotally what people are pointing to the most. Considering that participants not within a day’s drive of the playa (ie most of the world) have already decided months ago whether they’re going or not, the potential buyers in the market suddenly becomes very small. Like, four major coastal cities small.

No stranger to strange markets, I knew that the closer to the end of the event it got, the closer to zero dollars my tickets would be worth, and it seemed lots of other people were in the same boat. So I sold them immediately for a loss. It felt so… impersonal. So forced. And on a certain level I felt betrayed.

In the decade I’ve made the pilgrimage to Black Rock City I’ve gifted tickets, received tickets, bought tickets from friends, and been a recipient of a low income ticket. But I’ve never paid nor sold over face value— and this was intentional on the part of Burning Man. Since ticket demand started outpacing supply in 2011, the organization has taken steps to ensure that ticket prices remain fixed within the secondary market, ostensibly to uphold the principal of decommodification. A social contract of sorts was established over the years— no matter how much demand there may be on the fixed supply of tickets, please only sell them at the price you paid. Or gift them. Essentially, thou shalt not make money flipping tickets.

So now here we are, experiencing for the first time in Burning Man history a secondary market where demand has precipitously dropped below supply, and all the resources put into keeping the ticket prices from skyrocketing suddenly don’t apply to retaining their value. At this point Burning Man has the ticket sale money in pocket (and probably already spent most of it it on the event), so a loss in ticket value only sees artists, theme camps and participants left holding the bag.

It also opens up the principled question of profit; if one buys at a low price and sells at a higher price still below face value, is that okay? Is open market price discovery alright to happen below face value, even though it’s actively discouraged above it? How is one seemingly acceptable and the other out of line with the core principal of decommodification?

It’s hard to know what Burning Man Project thinks of this unprecedented phenomenon, as they have yet to make a public statement about it. What we do know is what they haven’t done, which is a lot. No request to the community to conduct ticket exchanges at face value (like they’ve done for a decade now), no buyback program to support the price floor, no acknowledgement at all that anything is amiss. I’m looking forward to hearing their thoughts and how they plan on addressing this type of thing in the future.

Maybe this years event will turn out to be a massive success. The dust will be minimal, the weather will be balmy. The wubs will wub and the Burners will Burn and we’ll all forget the Ticket Hot Potato Crisis of 2023. Maybe the last good burn won’t have to be the Renegade Burn, or next years SOAK³. This could all be a blip on the radar and we can continue the sold-out party that is That Thing In The Desert like a bunch of hooligans that didn’t just pay a thousand dollars for the opportunity to take a year off.

What I know for certain is that Burning Man, year over year, event after event, is never the same. And that’s what we like (or often pretend to hate) about it. After a crisis like this it’s hard not to see how things won’t be different; even if that difference is the sobering realization that the party has thoroughly jumped its own shark eating tail, and there’s nothing to do but take a year off and decide whether to do it all again next year.

Have fun out there everyone!

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1. Figuratively but also possibly quite literally. The extreme heat of Burning Man 2022 was oppressive at best and heat stroke inducing at worst. There’s only so many nights you can cram sleep AND roaming the city AND volunteering into the few precious hours of post-midnight sub 90° F temperatures before you begin to question whether this is a sustainable way to burn. ↩︎
2. STEP apparently doesn’t support the exchange of physical tickets. ↩︎
3. Shameless plug for the best regional out there, SOAK! ↩︎

A sliver of light stands out against the dark background of deep Playa as you ride towards the trash fence, past the inflatable neon elephant, keeping the 747 over your shoulder on the right. As you travel further and the dissonant rumble of the city dies away, a silvery podium rises up to greet you. It emanates sound and noise:

This is the Karaoke Deth Machine, a Burning Man art installation whose creative design began merely days before arriving on site. Its concept is simple; a podium emanating music with an effects steeped microphone attached, awaiting vocal input. Its execution; rather rough around the edges, but it definitely does something (and is lit at night, which is technically meeting the bare minimum requirements). The idea was inspired by a fun toy found at a rural thrift store and some light consultation with someone who knows more about how sound works than I do. An old boombox, a few cables, some warped pieces of lumber and 4 cans of spraypaint later and the Karaoke Deth Machine breathed its first dusty breaths.

Expectations

In harmony with the 2019 theme, Metamorphoses, the installation underwent its own changes over the course of the event. Its final iteration, microphone dangling in front of amplifier encouraging self-induced screeches and rumblings, will act as a launching point for the next version of the project (that’s right, expect more of these awkwardly dissonant contraptions). What began as a rather strange karaoke machine turned into an even weirder feedback noise machine, and it couldn’t have been accomplished in a more organic way.

My own expectations were forced into dusty rubble by the Karaoke Deth Machine as it transformed itself before my eyes. I watched as participants came, experienced, and left some change in their wake that permanently altered the installation, whether it was to change the position of the microphone to get a new noise, or even just shift the lights slightly. Any time I thought it wasn’t quite working correctly I was proven wrong by the next person who touched it.

Getting Placed

For placement of the project my intention was to go rogue. I had already attended several regional Burning Man events and, without issue installed “unofficial” self-placed art there. In Black Rock City, however, the rules are different. Hosting 350 (registered*) art installations** in one city requires more attention to where and how things are placed. I soon learned that my rogue art piece was in jeopardy of being confiscated if not accounted for correctly. With this new information I decided to opt-in to the Artery’s comically time-consuming yet entirely appropriate bureaucratic process (I was asked to come back several times in order to give the data time to make its wayward journey through the internet in order to appear successfully on the next persons tablet, and had to fill out the same form over again each time I returned. How I wish this was performance art***). By the end of the day it had been successfully placed at the trash fence to stay for the entirety of the event, and officially cataloged on Burning Man’s website for the rest of eternity.

So, what next?

Catalyzed by just one thrift store toy, the Karaoke Deth Machine was an experiment in spontaneous creation of sound. As more thrift store electronics are procured, more things become possible, and the Karaoke Deth Machine can (and will be) be used as a prototype for bigger and weirder interactive sound projects.

*This number does not include walk-ins like myself and other rogue installations (the small, unlit bbq I almost broke my leg on in the middle of the Playa one night was, after much debate, deemed moop and not art. Sorry-not-sorry aspiring artist who left it there).

**Fun fact: on top of (or more appropriately, in between) the 350 registered stationary art pieces there were approximately 560 mutant vehicles, also known as art cars. 2019 brought record numbers of both art installations and mobile art cars to the Playa.

***The lovely volunteers at the artery were fabulous throughout the entire process, and many stickers and hugs were shared. If you are an unaspiring artist like myself that might have anything at all to contribute to the event, but have doubts… Just bring it! The artery encourages walk-ins and makes it (mostly) easy for you to participate. With a little persistence, you, too can put something weird and/or wonderful in the middle of the desert for a week.