What the Art World Can Learn From Burning Man

If you think Burning Man is just a crowd in the desert dancing, taking drugs and doing wild things, think again. For one week, Black Rock City, erected in just days on the playa, becomes a living experiment in alternative society, guided by ten key principles, including Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression and Communal Effort.

With nonstop music, creativity and communal gathering from sunrise long into the night, the festival demonstrates each year that there may be another way to approach both cultural production and social organization at large—a way perhaps more attuned to what has set humans apart in the struggle for survival: our boundless imagination. Indeed, the Burning Man model raises urgent questions about how society functions today—queries that resonate with this year’s theme, “Tomorrow, Today.”

As the art world—like other creative industries before it, most especially music—is being forced to reckon with global overgrowth and extreme financialization, it is increasingly obvious that many of its foundational principles and business practices have become unsustainable. It is therefore worth asking what Burning Man’s alternative model of cultural production might teach us about sustainable, grassroots, community-led creativity. After a decade of attending art fairs, biennials and art weeks, experiencing Burning Man firsthand made me think it is time to draw some provocative parallels, even if some may see them as a stretch. I couldn’t stop wondering what the hyper-commercialized art world might learn from an event where art thrives entirely outside the market.

Each year, hundreds of monumental artworks rise from the dust of the playa, much as they would at a biennial or an art fair. In 2025, more than 250 pieces were presented in Black Rock City, alongside seventy-seven Honoraria projects supported by $1.6 million in grants. More than 327 installations—and likely closer to 350 when including smaller, last-minute contributions—were created (and often rebuilt after the storm that took out Ukraine’s Black Cloud) in the Nevada desert, in the middle of nowhere, with no expectation of financial return or museum acquisition.

Sometimes these installations have an afterlife as public art in cities or on private property, but most are burned or dismantled—a cathartic gesture that reaffirms their ephemerality and embraces the transience of all material possessions. Their main cultural and social value lies in shared experience, not permanence, resisting transformation into objects of longevity and resale, as the traditional art circuit tends to enforce. Alongside the stationary art of Burning Man, art cars become kinetic sculptures—rolling, glowing works on wheels that descend onto the playa every night, animating the vast emptiness of the desert and transforming it into a dreamer’s park that sparks collective imagination and demonstrates the boundless power of human creativity beyond any rational or opportunistic principles.

While standing before a large-scale interactive art piece on the playa, one might assume—as an article in the Burning Man Journal points out—these works were built by traditional metalworkers and fabricators. In reality, many of the installations emerge from community-run spaces where anyone can step in and learn the skills needed to join an art crew. A striking example of this community-driven ethos is the Flaming Lotus Girls, who for more than 25 years have fabricated kinetic fire art for Black Rock City and beyond. The collective prioritizes femme and queer creators but welcomes anyone, regardless of prior experience, to take part in the act of making.

Most importantly, Burning Man art remains entirely self-funded, crowdfunded and community-built—sustained by a radical bottom-up model that has become nearly impossible to maintain in the “official” art system, even at the most experimental tiers.

Art fairs vs. Burning Man: two economies

Since Burning Man is a festival, it is instructive to consider it in relation to art fairs. In the “official art system,” fairs present to the “art community” the latest initiatives and creations produced within the industry. Yet the crucial difference is that art fairs rely on a top-heavy financial model: galleries often pay hundreds of thousands to participate, with booth fees, shipping, customs, insurance, installation and staffing easily exceeding $100,000 before a single work is sold from the preview PDF. Add in the cost of producing new works specifically for the fair, and the stakes become immense and often barely recuperable even when sales are made on site. For galleries, art fairs have become stages of aspiration and accreditation, but they are also precarious financial terrain that can lead to exhaustion or, in the worst cases, closure.

By contrast, Burning Man operates from the ground up. Camps and artists are self-funded, pooling resources from participants and their communities. There is no “booth fee” and no expectation of profit—participants contribute through creativity and imagination. Instead of a transactional economy, Burning Man is participatory: art exists because people choose to build the experience together, regardless of resale value. Through the Black Rock City Honoraria, financial support is assigned to deserving projects to catalyze cross-cultural understanding and help communities nurture artists and leaders. While these grants cover some of the artists’ costs, most projects still require additional financial and logistical support from the community.

It is also worth noting that at art fairs, VIP collectors and patrons are often granted free passes, privileged access and dinners. Value in that system is tied to exclusivity and purchasing power, yet there is no guarantee those collectors will buy after enjoying the spectacle, meaning they may contribute little to sustaining the production of the global circus. Burning Man reverses this: attendees collectively cover costs through tickets and camp fees, directly supporting the event’s production. Tickets are expensive, but everyone pays and contributes—and what the ticket buys is not exclusivity but entry into a shared cultural experiment. This redistribution of responsibility reinforces a vital sense of collective ownership. Cultural and artistic production sustains itself not through hierarchy but through shared contribution to the event’s creation.

At the same time, because galleries must shoulder high costs and hedge against risk, the pressures of the art fair system often push production toward what is safe and sellable, particularly in today’s sluggish market. As Sylvain Levy recently observed, the problem with art fairs is not only their financial burden but their potential monopoly over our imagination, ultimately shaping and constraining the viability of artistic production itself.

On the other hand, Burning Man liberates creativity precisely because it is untethered from sales, built instead on radical decommodification and a gift economy. Monumental sculptures, interactive environments, spiritual and artistic workshops, rolling art cars and world-class DJs thrive outside the logic of demand. What emerges is grassroots creativity—born in communities, crowdfunded, co-built and freely given. Here lies Burning Man’s powerful notion of “matronage” as opposed to traditional patronage: rather than transactional funding, it fosters artist-community bonds, support rooted in relationships rather than sponsorships or sales.

From this perspective, art fairs reinforce art as a luxury commodity while Burning Man positions it as a communal good—accessible to anyone who walks the playa and sparking fertile forms of creative exchange that foster human understanding and cooperation. One sustains an art market; the other sustains a culture where value lies not in ownership but in gifted collective experience, circulating through a sharing economy. The ultimate aim of Burning Man’s cultural production is to support and celebrate cross-pollination and exchange. The art program in particular encourages participants to share and explore one another’s traditions, often through large-scale interactive works that draw on ancient stories from their respective cultures.

One example this year was Rose Wonders, which was realized as part of the 2025 Honoraria installation. This giant wooden sculpture is the newest addition to activist artist Thomas Dambo’s troll family, which journeyed from Denmark across the ocean to Black Rock City as a symbol of embodied connection with nature—a guardian figure long embedded in that country’s traditions. In this way, the work’s fundamental messages are shared and kept alive through the platform and community of Burning Man.

Lessons for the art world

One could argue that, in contrast to the capitalization and financialization dominating the market side of the art system, there is already the community-centered, nonprofit sphere of museums and biennials. Yet, particularly in the U.S.—and increasingly elsewhere as public funds shrink and budgets are cut—these institutions also rely heavily on a top-down model of patronage.

As the art world calls for change, particularly in the fair system, it may be worth considering alternative financing models that could ease some of the burden on galleries. A possibility could be rethinking ticketing structures to resemble a more participatory crowdfunding model, similar to what happens at Burning Man. What if ticketing shifted so that all participants—especially VIPs who enjoy the experience and can easily afford to contribute—helped sustain the ecosystem regardless of whether they purchased art? What if even those platforms invested in grassroots, community-driven creativity, where value lies not in ownership but in collective experience? Burning Man reminds us that art does not necessarily need to be mediated through capital to thrive, but can flourish when created, shared and experienced together. This might sound utopian, but it points toward the potential of sustainable, community-driven projects over profit-centered ones.

It’s not about replicating Burning Man but about taking seriously the possibility that sustainability lies in models that empower communities, share responsibility and value art for its capacity to generate connection and meaning beyond profit. As its website states, Burning Man is not intended as a utopian society, nor was it ever meant to be, but it is an influential cultural movement and social experiment with unique opportunities to prototype new solutions that the art industry, and society at large, could consider applying.

Burning Man’s financial and ideological crises

We cannot ignore that, as Burning Man has scaled up and become more structured as both a business and a cultural venture, it has begun facing financial and ideological crises that mirror those of many institutions. In 2023, producing Burning Man cost around $749 per participant, while the base ticket price was $575, resulting in a loss on every ticket sold. That year, the group’s $66.6 million in revenue barely covered $63.6 million in costs. The gap widened in 2024 due to lower-than-expected sales in both regular and premium tiers, creating an approximate $5.7 million shortfall, plus another $3 million loss from vehicle passes and main-ticket sales. By early 2025, the organization was still $14 million short, even after initial fundraising efforts.

These financial pressures forced Burning Man to rely heavily on a fundraising campaign. Initially designed to raise $10 million in philanthropic donations, the goal had doubled to $20 million by late 2024. Before the start of the 2025 edition, CEO Marian Goodell noted that through a mix of donations, cost reductions, staff restructuring and stronger ticket sales, the outlook had “improved considerably.” Still, extreme weather and a difficult prior year meant that 2025 did not entirely sell out; tickets remained available at the box office for those who made it to the gates after waiting an average of 8 to 21 hours in the desert.

The growing reliance on philanthropic giving—especially from within the Burner community—underscores the strength of bottom-up support. Yet when paired with ambitions for global expansion and increasing administrative sophistication, it has unsettled many Burners who remain committed to the event’s D.I.Y., camp-led ethos. For them, recent organizational choices signal a drift away from community-driven art and toward institutionalization, threatening to dilute the grassroots energy that defines Burning Man.

The contrast is stark—but also instructive when we draw parallels with the art world: it highlights how crucial it is to preserve financial models that empower artists and participants from the ground up, rather than funding top-heavy infrastructures. And this tension is not unique to Burning Man; it reverberates across the art industry, where similar pressures threaten to displace grassroots creativity in favor of institutional or elitist patronage.

Facing and overcoming Baumol’s “cost disease”

What is unfolding in both the art world and Burning Man resonates with William J. Baumol’s analysis in Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (1966, with William Bowen), where he positioned art at the crossroads of capital and gift economies. Baumol argued that artistic and cultural production faces a unique economic challenge: productivity in the arts cannot increase at the same pace as in other sectors. A Beethoven quartet still requires four musicians and roughly the same rehearsal and performance time as it did centuries ago, whereas manufacturing can scale through technology. Similarly, producing an artwork or an exhibition involves manual and intellectual labor whose costs cannot be reduced or replaced by machines.

This “cost disease” means that art and cultural production remain structurally expensive and often unprofitable under a purely capitalist framework, justifying the need for public subsidies, philanthropy or state support. Culture is therefore uneasily positioned within the capital economy, reliant on external flows to offset its built-in inefficiencies. At the same time, Baumol emphasized that art and cultural work generate forms of value that cannot be fully priced or commodified. He underscored the importance of the arts operating partly within a “gift economy” (drawing on anthropologists like Marcel Mauss): artists often create for recognition, symbolic capital or communal belonging, not only for financial return. Cultural goods circulate through logics of prestige, reputation and legacy, reinforcing the idea that the arts are simultaneously embedded in but not reducible to market systems. This explains why philanthropy, patronage and state funding remain central: cultural value is both exchanged and gifted, accruing symbolic returns outside the realm of profit. For Baumol, then, the arts are defined by this duality—they generate real economic activity (tourism, employment, creative industries) while also relying on non-market forms of support and justification. Capital sustains them through subsidies, endowments and high-value markets, while the gift economy legitimizes them as public goods tied to cultural identity, education and collective memory.

It is precisely here that cultural economist Pierluigi Sacco expands the argument. While Baumol frames culture as a fragile sector requiring subsidy, Sacco highlights how it is a generative system producing spillovers into innovation, education, social cohesion and urban development—making it an essential resource for both social and economic growth. As Burning Man demonstrates, the arts circulate symbolic, social and experiential capital that convert back into community value. Sacco also stresses—and Burning Man confirms—that the very “non-productivity” of the arts allows them to function as spaces of experimentation, meaning-making and symbolic exchange, activities that ultimately drive innovation and new forms of capital over the long term.

In many respects, Burning Man’s model aligns with what Sacco defines as Culture 3.0 (participatory, post-digital), which follows Culture 1.0 (the patronage era, when culture operated within a gift economy supported by elites) and Culture 2.0 (the age of mass cultural industries, when culture became embedded in market and capital logic). With the rise of the bourgeoisie, artists had already shifted to independent laborers reliant on public sales rather than aristocratic patronage. Today, crowdfunding and social media give artists and makers direct access to the public and support on an unprecedented scale.

Yet, as Caveat Magister noted in a 2016 article in the Burning Man Journal, the erosion of the middle class means more artists and institutions are increasingly dependent on the largesse of a new class of ultra-rich patrons. Burning Man itself straddles both models: founded on volunteerism and small-scale participant donations in its early years, later fueled almost entirely by ticket sales during its massive growth phase, it has become one of the largest hubs for participant- and community-funded art in the world. At the same time, it has also become a playground for the ultra-rich, particularly those from the tech sector.

In today’s economy—dominated by technology-centered corporations—art still intersects with new wealth through its ability to drive innovation and inspiration, as Burning Man illustrates. The challenge for the art world is to engage these communities in ways that sustain art’s role not only in advancing technical progress but also in cultivating the human cognitive, imaginative and creative capacities that make such progress possible. Crucially, this must be done while preserving participatory, grassroots foundations so that art is not reduced to the service of profit logics but continues to imagine and create a “protopian future.”

Writer’s note: This piece does not aim to provide answers but to raise questions and open comparisons, exploring the possibility of alternative models that could make artistic and cultural production more sustainable through participatory, grassroots approaches that recognize the impact of art and culture on society’s evolution beyond the narrow logic of direct capital creation.