"No Politics" at Burning Man? I've Got Bad News For You...

Recently, I put up a somewhat well-discussed blog post asking foreigners not to come to Burning Man or spend their tourism money in the USA at all. As I knew I would, I got some comments along the lines of, “Politics don’t belong at Burning Man.”

I'm trying to be respectful here, but my better instincts are failing to win out, so…

You have got to be joking!

If you think politics don’t belong at Burning Man, I have bad news for you: you’re soaking in them like it’s Mudman all over again and that will always be the case. 

Burning Man isn’t just an art festival in the desert. It’s a pop-up city. A temporary society with values and systems and norms and a hell of a lot of shared assumptions about what matters. Guess how those assumptions, values, and systems were arrived at? Yep. Politics.

Radical inclusion? Political. Gifting instead of commerce? Political. Radical self-expression? Political. Civic responsibility? So political!

Hell, there are plenty of politics in individual theme camps!

Here’s the thing: politics isn’t just elections or whatever two-party slapfight is happening on CNN. Politics is how we, as humans, decide who gets what, who does what, and how we live together without stabbing each other with rebar (though you’re not still using rebar I hope). 

It’s not just about presidents and policies—it’s about power, resources, voice, and community, and there’s no opting out unless you go live on an island by yourself.​

It's An Art Festival!

Burning Man is also an art festival for the love of Larry! An art festival! There is no separating art and politics. 

Just a handful of examples:

• ​The excellent Ukranian art piece “I’m Fine” on the playa last year was highly political. (It was constructed from shrapnel and bullet hole-filled signs, gates, etc from Ukraine.) Personally, I thought it was one of the very best things I've ever seen at Burning Man.

Co-created by Ukrainian artist Oleksiy Sai, DJ Anatoly Tapolsky (frontline soldier), and former Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Vitaliy Deynega.

• Pride flags are political art.
  ​
• One of the biggest art pieces - maybe the biggest (though not the most complex, by far) - ever at Burning Man was Otto von Danger’s “Burn Wall Street" in 2012 - explicitly political.

Otto von Danger's "Burn Wall Street"

• The official theme of Burning Man in ‘08 was “The American Dream!” for fuck’s sake!
  
  
• What do you think the decision to build the 2024 Temple out of reclaimed materials was? A political statement!​
  ​

Saying “No politics at Burning Man” stands in direct opposition to the fact that artists don’t create in a vacuum and are always influenced by the world around them, whose power structure is arrived at via the politics that surround us all the time.

To ask artists not to provide commentary on some of the most important issues in our world is to ask them to water down their art until it’s just decoration, bereft of significance other than “it’s pretty” or “how cool.” And that's fine, of course! There has certainly been some incredibly cool but not particularly meaningful art at Burning Man. 

But imagine if Banksy’s motto was, “No politics” or someone told Picasso to keep politics out of Guernica. Or told the Ukranians above not to express their intense feelings about the war in their country...

Art is protest. It’s hope. It’s grief. It’s rebellion. And meaningful art is frequently political as hell. 

Even the vibe of “this exists for no economic reason, just because someone dreamed it and built it and now it’s here” that we see in some beautiful but not explicitly meaningful art on the playa is a giant middle finger to rote consumer capitalism and the cult of productivity.

You think Burning Man is somehow outside the US political system? See 2018’s gauntlet of law enforcement run by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs between Reno and Gerlach. And…you know that Burning Man happens on federal land that is available for we the public to use because of…politics, right?  

Or, are you aware that the Central Nevada Health District is proposing increasing the inspection fee for camps gifting most food and some drinks from the current $50 to between $375 and $525 depending on what's being offered? Guess how we can oppose and potentially stop that? Yeah, politics.

"I mean a different kind of politics though!"

You might be saying, "Ok, sure, I can accept all that. I just don’t want to see things like campaign signs at Burning Man. "

I understand that. And I largely agree with you too! A standard campaign sign is a pretty boring and conventional way to express yourself on the playa. I’m sure we can do better than that. 

But, if that’s how someone wants to express themselves, well, as the principle says, “radical self-expression.” It may feel mundane, but I’ve seen plenty of mundane art at Burning Man alongside the art that blew my mind. It’s in the eye of the beholder.

Or maybe you’re asking for “no politics” not because you think it’s boring, but because you feel a particular type of politics, like American elections, is  too divisive?

I get that, but the sheer act of asking people to avoid divisiveness is political.  You’re choosing whose voices and what areas of discussion are acceptable.  That’s a power move. That’s politics!

What if someone doesn’t want to see the divisive politics around the war in Ukraine, for instance, such as represented in the “I’m Fine” art piece? That war is extremely divisive to the tune of hundreds of thousands of deaths, and is also tied closely to American electoral politics to boot!

I want more art like that, not less.

“Oh, but that’s different!"

It’s different to you. It’s not different to other people.  Everyone has their own issues they prioritize and see as acceptably divisive. 

Take pride flags. You can’t tell me with a straight face that pride flags aren’t divisive in America. They shouldn’t be, but they absolutely are. Should we get rid of them at Burning Man as a result? Of course not!

It seems to me that a lot of people asking for “no politics at Burning Man” just don’t want to be reminded of hard things. They want escape. Which, cool—who doesn’t? But pretending politics aren’t part of the fabric of Black Rock City is like pretending MOOP cleans itself up. You might want to act like it's not there, but someone’s doing the work. 

Radical expression in all its messy, beautiful, confrontational, weird ways is part of the point, and if we start drawing lines around what are the “right” or “wrong” types of political expression we lose the very thing that makes this whole dusty art orgy worth doing in the first place.

Types of Expression vs Content of Expression

That said, there is a difference between types of political expression and the actual content of specific political expression. This is a really important distinction. 

For instance, I am not ok with a hypothetical Andrew Tate pro-misogyny march through Center Camp or a bunch of people spitting lies in Center Camp about how trans people are mentally ill or how Haitian immigrants eat peoples’ pets. That is not the kind of expression I, or many of us I'd imagine, would be willing to treat with a shrug out there. 

People may have the legal right to express those things, but we - whether that means us individually, as a community, or as the Org - don’t have to welcome it or accept it at Burning Man, which is a private event, and nor should we. 

We can recognize that political expression not only belongs at but is inevitable at Burning Man without accepting that self-expression that falls into the realm of the vile must be welcomed. 
 
I can already hear some of you shouting, “But what about radical inclusion?!” 

Well, to those of you who are actually concerned about that, vs those who invoke it because they want a rhetorical tool to justify being shitty people, I’m just going to leave you with this link to Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. It answers your question very well. 

To Sum Up

Politics have always been—and always will be—a part of Burning Man - an art festival. The desire to ban only certain categories of politics - like American electoral politics - is exactly what it looks like: arbitrary.  (though we can probably all agree that things like campaign signs would be awfully boring out there.) 

"No politics" is also incredibly  tone-deaf when the country is currently rapidly backsliding into frightening authoritarianism. People are literally being disappeared off the streets in America because the administration didn't like what they wrote in a student paper.

"Radical self-expression" is one of Burning Man’s official principles. “No politics” not only isn’t—it seeks to suppress an entire category of important self-expression and in doing so, is inherently in service to the existing power structure, which seeks to suppress political expression that doesn't align with it. 

And finally, we don't have to accept the vile and hateful in our communities whether on the playa or off.