BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- Larry Harvey's 16th annual celebration of radical self-expression doesn't start until Monday, but workers setting up here some 120 miles north of Reno have already posted a sign at the entrance to the event site: BURNING MAN WAS BETTER LAST YEAR.
"People seem to be asking me a lot, 'Has it peaked'?" says Harvey, who held his first burn of a wooden effigy on a San Francisco beach in 1986 and watched the crowds swell in following years from 20 to over 20,000, forcing the event to its current location.
San Francisco's arch hipsters annually bemoan that Burning Man used to be better, but this year Harvey is facing his first-ever downturn in attendance. Advance ticket sales, he says, suggest a 5 percent drop from last year's peak of 25,500 attendees. Attendance skyrocketed along with San Francisco's Internet startups in the late 1990s, so it seems only natural to expect a fall off in 2001. "The dot-com thing will affect us a little bit," he admits.
But unlike some of his participants, Harvey won't be holding a liquidation auction on eBay. Burning Man 2001 is bigger than ever in budget -- over $4 million -- and in the size of its on-site art installations. The Man himself will reach new heights this year, boosted to 70 feet above the desert floor by a new three-story pedestal, suggesting a more libertine Statue of Liberty.
To tour the inside of the pedestal prior to next Saturday night -- when it and the Man will be torched as the celebration's climax -- participants will need to collect stamps from six large-scale installations that represent this year's theme: Shakespeare's seven ages of man. The tour culminates at a mausoleum built out of jigsaw dinosaur puzzle bones several hundred yards out on the Black Rock Desert playa -- a dry lake bed managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Visitors will be asked to leave notes about personal loss in the mausoleum, which will also be torched at week's end.
But the bulk of Burning Man's art and energy comes from participants, many of whom spend small personal fortunes to build and transport original works to the desert for a week. This year's participant artworks range from "large-scale sound art" (read: big stereos) to a set of 14 green neon towers ranging to 50 feet high, based on the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz. But the Burning Man ethos is best captured by theme camp Illumination Village: "Creating World Class Art and Lighting It on Fire."
Setting up a temporary city that goes up in flames after a week has, ironically, become a year-round, full-time job for Harvey and a dozen other members of Burning Man LLC, augmented by a worldwide volunteer network estimated at 2,000 strong.
Harvey's goal isn't to make it big as a businessman, though. "I know where the money is," he said. "We could start licensing fashions and products. We're never going to hit the big money because that requires commodification and mass production. We've done the reverse of that: We let people build their own thing, and then come to them and say 'How can we help you?'"
Help comes in the form of grants to artists from the company's nonprofit spinoff, Black Rock Arts, which in its most recent fiscal year donated $250,000 directly to promising projects.
Still, articles in both National Geographic and AAA's Via magazine this year notably downplayed the event's bacchanalian reputation for rampant drugs, nudity and all night revelry, leading some old-timers to wonder if Harvey and company aren't coyly marketing themselves to the Winnebago set in response to dot-com doldrums.
"It does seem like we're starting to attract the white-shoe Republican crowd," says the 53-year-old Harvey, "but I'm creeping up there myself. I'm beginning to identify with the RV crowd."
Behind the pyrotechnics, Harvey still has hopes for Burning Man as a tonic for a culture he feels has become too focused on fulfillment through consumption of mass-produced goods. "It replaces the traditions that tell you who and what and where you are," he said.
Harvey's personal thesis on society could fill a book, but he offers an executive summary: "Make your own damn world."
