Art Basel in Miami is coming up in a couple of weeks (Dec 3-6). Many Burners love to attend this event, and more and more Burner artists are exhibiting their work there. In 2015, there will be 267 galleries from 32 countries in the official show.
This year things are going to the next level for glowy- blinky- flamey- mobile- popup- UV- trippy- art (or whatever you want to call this genre…), with more than a dozen Burner artists teaming up to display their works in an air-conditioned warehouse filled with art cars.
Burner Stoke says:
Edge Art Fair is open to the public from 12:00 pm – 12:00 am each day. Its located in an air conditioned warehouse located at 1584 NW 29th St, Miami, 33142 just on the Edge of Wynwood.
Although this is our first year our artists have spent over 100 years combined at the Burning Man arts festival in Nevada and we are bringing that look and feel to Basel.
Yarrow Mazzetti (cofounder of the fair) is the most prolific mutant vehicle builder in the world having transformed 26 cars into mutant vehicles. Our ladybuggies (type of mutant vehicle but consider it mobile street art) will be at the fair. Yarrow will also be unveiling two new pieces for the first time. The first are his series of Jellyfish which are 3 – 10 foot tall fiberglass shell jellyfish embedded with LEDs and Fiberoptics that change color to the music… He is also unveiling his “Nails” piece which are 8 foot long nails which will eventually form a major part of his street art.
JROC will be unveiling his 9 foot tall stainless steel dragon head.
Kenny Ferron – will be installing two LED music sensitive palm trees.
Samantha Scott – will be live painting models in blacklight paint. As she dresses all in black all you will be see from afar is a paintbrush glowing in blacklight paint – painting the model. Her photographs of models she has painted are for sale. If someone want to prebuy their piece they can participate in the painting of the model.
Richie Driscoll will be coming from LA to install his Chain Man piece. Chain man lives in an interactive chain land which the artist will build. Think adult version of a playground.
Peter Ruprecht and Tomas Loewy are two of the most successful photographers who amongs other areas have consistently shot Burning Man and so the entire walls of the warehouse will be covered in black material – with spot lights illuminating Tomas and Peter’s photographs.
Jeff Silver will be unveiling his light sandbox – which is an interactive sandbox built five feet of the ground. When you move your hand through the sand the lines you created illuminate by the LED lights which have been placed underneath.
When Hurricane Sandy took out power to Lower Manhattan, the Lady Buggies were one of the few things still glowing off in the Meatpacking District
I also hear that crowd favorite Rob Buchholz will be exhibiting some of his work in Miami this year.
We support Burner art getting out into the wider world. It seems this sort of thing is how we take Burner culture to millions of people – more so than going on Dr Phil and Oprah with the message “hey, are you grieving? Come to our Temple, and be sure to make a non-deductible $419 donation to our tax-exempt corporate structure on the way in” – like some sort of Discordian televangelist. Or going on The Simpsons with “hey you can drop acid blue-haired Mom like it’s the 60s all over again and rekindle the romance with your husband”. This is bringing a caricaturized view of our culture to people who really could care less about the art and participation, and just want to be spectators. They may or may not have a good time, but how is it changing the world? Meanwhile, art is changing the world, always has been, always will be.
Bringing Burner art into the mainstream and high end of the art world is ultimately going to impact many, many more people than the Burning Man Project’s plans of panel discussions and preaching to the converted. What’s it all about, the art? Or the preaching? We need to be kicking down the doors for these artists, helping elevate them to the highest levels possible, and supporting them when public controversy is stirred – as with Marco Cochrane’s recent installation of Truth Is Beauty which has been causing disquiet on a $200 million tech campus.
If Burning Man is the Special Olympics of art, Art Basel is the Olympics. The association with the Burner world may not be the same stamp of credibility in Miami as it is in San Francisco’s Mission District. Regardless, sold out shows send a strong message, so please help support these Burner artists. If you’re anywhere near Art Basel this year, check this out, tell your friends.
Here is their flyer:
Check out Kenny Ferron’s SubSqwad at the Alchemy Burn in Georgia:
For the last 5 years, tens of thousands of residents of Las Vegas have enjoyed the annual Halloween Parade. This has featured Burner art cars like Dancetronauts Strip Ship, and has been linked to a Burner-fuelled gentrification revival of Downtown Las Vegas. It is organized by Cory Mervis, who three years ago was hired by the Burning Man Project as their cultural attache for Las Vegas.
Cory Mervis and Toni Wallace drove their school bus painted like an American Bald Eagle to Black Rock City as part of a 10,000-mile journey to spell the word “Vote” on a continent-wide scale.
Organizers of the Las Vegas Halloween Parade, which has marched for the past five years, decided to cancel the 2015 event, citing increased costs.
“We’d been negotiating for months with a potential partner who could help offset our expected increase in infrastructure and security costs,” said event founder Cory Mervis. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t agree on a plan that met everyone’s needs and time ran out.”
In 2014, the parade took place along East Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. Organizers said about 70,000 people attended the event, which took place on a Saturday. A turnout of 100,000 was expected.
The parade’s focus will be placed on the 2016 event, with organizers hoping to bring in additional sponsors and support.
Cory was appointed by BMOrg with great fanfare ago 3 years ago. The Burning Man Project had ambitions to transform an entire city by working with the real estate developer, Billionaire Burner Tony Hsieh (he sold Zappos to fellow Billionaire Burner Jeff Bezos, who names Amazon’s products “fire”, “kindle”, “burn”, etc). The Downtown Project bought Burning Man art like the Praying Mantis to be the front piece of their shipping container shopping mall, and transported the BMOrg-funded YES Spaceship art car to their office lobby. Across his business empire, Hsieh embraced the same Hippy Operating Systemself management system called “holocracy” that empowers BMOrg’s force of 70 full-time staff to make themselves look busy year-round while achieving little in the way of measurable output.
Y.E.S. Spaceship in Zappos Lobby. Image: Glass Door
BMOrg CEO Marian Goodell came out to Las Vegas to give a speech (at Electric Dasiy Carnival’s attached business networking conference). She said:
“Las Vegas provides a rich landscape ripe with opportunities for civic participation and public gathering, and we look forward to engaging in this collaborative effort.”
She then described the partnership with Cory Mervis, the Downtown Project and the Burner-inspired company behind First Friday, noting that Art Cars were a key part of the vision:
The partnership will enhance First Friday in Las Vegas by providing more opportunities for participation and interaction, strengthening the event’s civic-minded emphasis, and developing ways to keep attendees connected. The partnership would also like to provide storage, or a museum space, for art cars in Las Vegas so that they can participate in the First Friday and other public art events. In order to facilitate this process, the Burning Man Project is hiring a liaison, or “cultural attaché” that will be based in Las Vegas to work closely with Downtown Project.
“Hiring” means BMOrg is paying for this – which means we, the community, are paying for this. To my knowledge, this is the first time Burning Man has hired a full-time cultural attache to represent them in another city.
The Las Vegas Sun published a lengthy article in 2012 about all the links between Las Vegas and Burning Man, promoting it as an example of how the official Regional events can be used to accommodate the culture’s growth beyond available tickets to the Gerlach burn:
The main spark…came when Vanas, an event planner, was invited by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to invest in First Friday and handed a ticket to Burning Man. It was there that Vanas had his epiphany and chose to commit to First Friday LLC, a decision he says was based on the creativity and community experience he saw at Burning Man. Vanas and other locals in the Burning Man community want to see some of the event’s large-scale, interactive sculptures planted downtown.
This month’s First Friday festival, held on the “Burnal Equinox” (halfway between annual Burning Man events), might be the gateway to more Burning Man-inspired activities, motivated by the community-building principals of Black Rock City, which pops up in Northern Nevada for a week each year with theme camps, the burning of The Man and 50,000 attendees.
“It’s just the beginning,” says Bocskor, who, along with Mervis, runs the Society for Experimental Arts and Learning, a creative group inspired by Burning Man. “That’s why the name Flames of Change is so wonderful. What’s happening here in Vegas is setting new examples of what we can do. … With the first build of Lucky Lady Lucy, we had stagehands, accountants, bartenders, chefs, kids — all working together.
“It’s important for regional activities to go on that have the sense of Burning Man culture because the attendance is capped. There are more people who want to go than there are tickets.”
The Washington Post (also bought by Bezos) wrote breathlessly about Larry Harvey’s genius for urban renewal:
These days, Harvey — now in his mid-60s, dressed in a gray cowboy hat, silver western shirt, and aviator sunglasses — is just as likely to reference Richard Florida as the beatniks he once met on Haight Street. Most recently, he’s been talking with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who shares his vision of revitalizing Las Vegas, one of the cities hardest hit by the recent housing bust. “Urban renewal? We’re qualified. We’ve built up and torn down cities for 20 years,” says Harvey. “Cities everywhere are calling for artists, and it’s a blank slate there, blocks and blocks. … We want to extend the civil experiment — to see if business and art can coincide and not maim one another.”
Harvey points out that there’s been long-standing ties between Burning Man artists and to some of the private sector’s most successful executives. Its arts foundation, which distributes grants for festival projects, has received backing from everyone from real-estate magnate Christopher Bently to Mark Pincus, head of online gaming giant Zynga, as the Wall Street Journal points out. “There are a fair number of billionaires” who come to the festival every year, says Harvey, adding that some of the art is privately funded as well. In this way, Burning Man is a microcosm of San Francisco itself, stripping the bohemian artists and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of their usual tribal markers on the blank slate of the Nevada desert. At Burning Man, “when someone asks, ‘what do you do?’ — they meant, what did you just do” that day, he explains.
So what did BMOrg just do?
It’s been three and a half years now since this BMOrg-sponsored PR campaign kicked off. The Art Car parade grew, from 1,000 in 2010, 12,000 at the time BMOrg announced the partnership, to 70,000 last year, and an expected 100,000 this year.
BMOrg made an announcement that they’d picked a city to support, and it was Las Vegas. They got some press to write about it, and sent Marian for a panel discussion. They hired a cultural attache.
And this is what it has all come to. Parade cancelled, Burners pissed, 100,000 people disappointed.
With all the skills and talent and resources in this community, with all the Medici style HNWI patrons, with hundreds of art cars on tap and easily summoned to action…we couldn’t even get a parade together?
It’s bad enough that the parade couldn’t be organized by its self-appointed organizers and their financial behemoth partners. What makes it worse is that the cancellation came just 3 weeks before the event. People had already been spending months working on costumes and art cars in preparation.
So, what went wrong?
The estimated budget was $150,000. There are people in Vegas dropping that nightly. Ex-Kardashian Lamar Odom just spent $75,000 for a weekend drug binge with two hookers he didn’t even touch.
Lebron James Bar Tab. Image: Brobible
Surely the cultural attache of Burning Man can organize a street party, when they’ve been doing it for years, and it has the mayor’s blessing, the people’s support, sponsors, cops ready to go, and all the permits required. Right?
“It really sucks,” she says. “This was heartbreaking to have to call it off. We did everything in our power to make this happen. In the end, it was the smart thing to do.”
Mervis says it came down to not having the financial backing to do the things they wanted to do.
For the past few months, they have been able to acquire some sponsorships. But wanting to make the event bigger than before – Halloween is on a Saturday and Mervis thought there would be a larger crowd – she knew it would take more money.
“We wanted more police officers, more barricades, more marketing and needed more insurance,” she says. “We were looking at about $150,000. I could have finagled the budget, but I really didn’t want to do things on the cheap.”
Mervis says they do plan to return next year. She hopes to spend the next year acquiring more sponsors and up the ante on the parade.
“Ask me where I’m going for Halloween?” she says. “Disneyland. I want to get a few ideas. I want this to be like the Macy’s parade one day.”
It sounds like the money could have been raised, and perhaps even some fat in the budget could be trimmed (for example, save money on marketing, contact Burners.Me) but the standards of the organizers were too high. Couldn’t Burning Man’s full-time cultural attache go to the $34 million parent company and say “hey, we’re in danger of having no parade at all, please contribute”? What about starting a Kickstarter, and marketing that to BMOrg’s nearly 1 million strong Facebook audience? This sounds like exactly the kind of art in community situation that Burning Man Arts should be reaching out and supporting.
Here’s Cory Mervis giving a speech. Note the Beatles-style jacket, just like that usually worn by Burning Man’s Social Alchemist and Global Ambassador, Bear Kittay. Is this a uniform now?
She seems to have no problem riding the coat-tails of the Burning Man brand, network, and social movement. And BMOrg seem to have no problem endorsing her, employing her, and funding her. Indeed Zappos, the Downtown Project, and the City of Las Vegas seem to all have been enthusiastic partners of Burning Man. So a failure like this hurts the global spread of our culture.
Who takes responsibility? Who takes the blame? Who fixes the mess? Who looks at it to say “we fucked up, what can we do better next time?”. Nobody. For the sake of a few minutes launching a Kickstarter, or a couple of phone calls to Larry and Marian, everybody missed out.
Burners were not impressed with the surprise last-minute cancellation. Some had planned international travel to attend the Parade.
Is there, as one of the commenters suggested, more to this story that they’re not telling us? There usually is. Earlier this year the BLM moved against Further Future at the last minute, forcing them to change venue. Those guys are total professionals, and had a Plan B lined up. The Burning Man Project team seems less experienced with event planning.
Nevada politics is a murky scene, but still, a parade doesn’t seem that hard to put together. $150,000? Really?
“Stereo! That spells trouble – another all night rave!”
The new and improved (?) Mutant Vehicle Sound Policy – starring the Dance Music Zone – has been posted at ePlaya (thanks JV). Loud Art Cars can play music loud outside the Dance Music Zone – but only next to the 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock sound camps. This year there are 6 art cars with Level 3 systems.
Burning Man has had a sound policy for a few years now. Those policies are being expanded and clarified in 2015. Mutant Vehicle builders, drivers, and interested people should take a few minutes to read through the Mutant Vehicle Sound Policy below…
SOUND POLICY
Mutant Vehicle sound systems are classified into three levels.
Level 1: Normal car stereo / average living room (under 90 dB at a distance of 30 feet from the speaker)
Level 2: Dance club or theatre (90 dB and up at a distance of less than 100 feet)
Level 3: Large dance club, arena, or stadium (100+ dB at a distance of 100+ feet)
(Note: All decibel levels refer to maximum potential dBA.)
The dB levels here are intended as guidelines. What is important is the impact your vehicle’s sound has on your surroundings.
Vehicles with Level 1 systems may play anywhere in Black Rock City, but must be mindful of your volume and surroundings, especially in quieter areas of the City or late at night.
Vehicles with Level 2 systems may only play at high volume on the open playa (not on or pointing right into the city streets) and must be mindful of where you are playing and turn it down when appropriate — e.g. around art pieces, burns, etc.
Vehicles with Level 3 systems may ONLY play at high volume by the Large Scale Sound Camps on the 2:00 and 10:00 sides of the City, with speakers pointing out to the deep playa.
If you get more than two warnings about your sound system, you may lose your Mutant Vehicle license and the right to drive your vehicle for the rest of the event.
DANCE MUSIC ZONE (DMZ): LEVL 3 SOUND MUTANT VEHICLE PARKING
This year we are establishing a deep playa zone where level three mutant vehicles can park for more than 3 hours. The zone will be 5,340 feet from The Man between the 10:30 and 11:15 clock positions with banks of toilets at each end. This distance out follows the arc of Kook Street. The length of the arc is 1,747 feet. Art placement will be modified to accommodate this zone.
The new experimental zone will allow for a longer stay, up to 12 hours as well as provide sanitary stations at this fixed site. The area is large enough for several level 3 sound vehicles to occupy the zone, where their speakers must be turned out and away from the city. The restriction no “encampments” still applies: no camping or setting up speakers or other type of structures on the ground. Of course leave no trace practices must continue.
In this effort we are reacting to the rise of edge cases with a spirit of giving permission whilst supporting all aspects of the community, rather than creating new restrictions.
We hope this experiment is successful in limiting the impact of deep playa gatherings on other members of the community including art installations, sound camps, the temple and other non-partying participants, and that it will additionally promote public safety and sanitation, while holding to our leave no trace principle.
[Update 7/21/15 2:37pm]
Thanks to Anonymous Burner for sharing this latest email to the Placement mailing list. BMOrg persist with the public shaming of Mayan Warrior, despite their apologies and the fact that they didn’t actually break any rules, since up until now this has been an unwritten request that BMOrg have tried to keep “on the downlow”.
3. Announcing DJ Lineups in BRC
Dear artists, organizers and leaders who make Black Rock City what it is,
We’re writing to you with a request. We want you to refrain from pre-announcing and promoting your on-playa DJ lineups, a practice that many sound camps already employ. If you absolutely must announce your lineups ahead of time, we ask that you wait until the week before the event. Here’s why:
As you may be aware, the beloved Mayan Warrior Mutant Vehicle crew recently announced their DJ lineup, much like it was the lineup for an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festival all its own. (They have since taken the lineup down from their website, which we appreciate.) We want to share with you this comment a Burner posted in response to the announcement at Resident Advisor:
“Hey, I really love Burning Man, and I really love music at Burning Man, and as a long-time Burner, I love the artistry behind your car, the sound system, and as always, the people you bring on your car to play.
But releasing a lineup like this, over a month in advance, flies right in the face of the rules and is pretty disrespectful in general. We want to avoid turning Burning Man into an EDM festival, with people hunting for lineups and timeslots. Burning Man is not an EDM festival, or even a music festival. It’s something else, undefineable.”
Even to someone who loves EDM enough to comment on an EDM news site, the practice of posting on-playa DJ lineups causes an upsetting sensation that there’s un-Burning Man-like activity going on. We couldn’t agree more — in fact, for many years, we’ve discretely requested that camps keep their line-ups a surprise. So yes, we feel that sensation, and we bet some of you do, too.
These kinds of promotions create notoriety in a community that doesn’t necessarily share our principles, and specifically commodifies and commercializes artistic experiences. Promotion beyond Black Rock City gets especially uncomfortable when on-playa camps, Mutant Vehicles and events are connected to off-playa commercial enterprises.
Promoting lineups to a worldwide audience is not the same thing as listing an act or an event within the confines of Black Rock City, in resources like the online Playa Events Calendar or the printed WhatWhereWhen guide distributed to participants when they arrive. Those are for reaching people who are already going to be on the playa to let them know what’s going on. They are not intended to build a brand on the merits of an appearance at Burning Man. It’s simply unnecessary to promote beyond ticketed Burners for an experience you’re giving to Black Rock City.
Burning Man is an experiment in temporary community, not a traditional festival like the others. So when our participants post splashy DJ lineups, EDM sites and forums talk about us as though we are, spreading that message far and wide. It can also add to an already painful ticket scarcity issue — we don’t want to artificially drive up demand for tickets that aren’t available, and the attraction of big-name DJs can also drive up the price of after-market tickets.
Burning Man doesn’t have “headliners”. We pride ourselves on that. Burners don’t follow anyone else to Black Rock City, they go for themselves. Please understand, we don’t have anything against EDM, an art form whose vibrant community has made great contributions to Burning Man for many years. But we welcome members of the EDM community to come to Burning Man for a different experience than they’re used to: to fully participate in an experiment in a temporary community.
So, while we used to ask this on the downlow, we’ve seen enough instances in the last couple years that we feel the need to formally ask you not to announce your lineups. If you are dead-set on it, OK, but please wait until a week prior to the event before you do so. However, as surprise is great fun, and playa rumors help make things more exciting, we’d suggest that not announcing your lineup at all would be ideal. We’re asking you to listen to this request, think about it, and do what’s right for Burning Man culture. Thank you.
