One year, on a crisp desert night, at a bit past midnight, I biked out past the chaos of Black Rock City into what is known as Deep Playa – a swath of open land stretching toward the annual festival’s roughly nine-mile perimeter. Unlike the gridded center of Burning Man, attendees do not camp in Deep Playa. Instead it serves as an open-air gallery, where large-scale creations of whimsy dot its moon-like expanse.

The experience of biking between installations is comparable, somehow, to hopping between Chelsea’s galleries – moving between works, the sense of discovery when a piece speaks to you, the social ritual of taking it in among likeminded strangers. Out here, however, attendants are not always present, and offerings can be far stranger than wine. There is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a distinctive sense of scale and disorientation to the art: That night, we were searching for a Boeing 747-turned roving art car that, despite real commitment, we were never able to find.

Of all the strange delights I encountered while failing to find the Boeing, I was most enraptured by a realistic-looking gas station called Awful’s Gas & Snack (2019) by Matthew Gerring & Crank Factory. An attendant informed me the year was 2120 and gas was a long-gone resource, before sharing a variety of fictitious, yet convincing-looking, convenience store snacks.

The next night, I once again rode out to Deep Playa, specifically to revisit the station, only to discover it was gone – a burning pit of ashes in its place. ‘Frank, the manager, burned it down for the insurance money, not sure what we’re going to do for work on Monday,’ a man in a ten-gallon hat sitting pit-side, watching a rerun of the American animated sitcom King of the Hill, informed me.

For Ralph Nauta, cofounder of DRIFT, that freedom is central to the festival’s appeal. Burning Man is guided by ten principles, a set of values first articulated to define its culture by its cofounder, Larry Harvey. ‘Burning Man is about radical self-expression. It’s the fifth principle, written by Harvey, and I think it captures what makes it so special,’ Nauta says. ‘It’s a creative playground where you can experiment without the usual cultural gatekeepers telling you what is relevant or valuable. There’s a real freedom to make things without having to fit into an existing system or follow the expectations of the culture around you.’

For longtime Burning Man attendee and MTV cofounder Bob Pittman, the permission to create art takes priority over the art itself being polished. ‘Some people do great stuff, a lot of people don’t, but what’s wonderful is everybody is expressing themselves,’ Pittman reflected in a recent phone interview. ‘It’s this expression of art not filtered by a gallery, not filtered by critics, not filtered by ‘experts’. People bring their stuff, and as you would expect, most of it’s probably not very good, but some of it is brilliant.’

More than any one specific influence Burning Man may have inspired in the art world – the normalization of LEDs, fire, large-scale sculpture, etc. – Pittman believes the festival’s most significant impact over the decades has been to broaden public perception of what can be considered art. This push has been achieved through a ripple effect as the event grew from an intimate gathering in the 1980s to become one of the world’s largest temporary metropolises.

‘At first it influenced people who influenced others, but they didn’t know where those people were picking up their inspiration.  And then over time it influenced a broader group of people,’ Pittman adds. ‘It has allowed the average person to participate. You’ve gotten rid of the gatekeepers.  Everybody’s a creator now. And I think Burning Man was one of the first things that sort of unleashed that.’

Other phenomena have comparably expanded the publicly accepted parameters of a particular genre: Woodstock; the Internet; MTV. ‘At MTV, we broke the rules and we gave people a lot of freedom as a result. I think Burning Man’s done the same thing, in some ways on a broader scale,’ Pittman said.

Burning Man has served as a testing ground for some artists. American light artist and LED pioneer Leo Villareal considers his career to have begun there in 1997, when, after repeatedly struggling to find his encampment, he strung up blinking lights to act as a beacon. ‘The art-making both on and off the playa evolved from there,’ he once told KQED, a public media outlet based in the San Francisco Bay Area. That evolution has remained significantly rooted in an ethos of impermanence he also credits to the festival.

If Villareal’s work points to one form of Burning Man’s afterlife – temporary experiments that can evolve into public commissions or permanent installations – the American sculptor David Best’s ‘Temples’ represent another. These are works whose meaning depends on their disappearance. In 2000, Best built the festival’s first ‘Temple’, inaugurating what has since become one of Burning Man’s defining rituals. Each year, the event culminates in two major burns. The first is the burning of the ‘Man’, the festival’s central effigy: a spectacular, Dionysian affair that some revelers fly in for at considerable cost. The second is the burning of the Temple, a quieter and more somber ceremony. Conceived as a stand-alone space for grief, remembrance, and handwritten memorials, it is set alight not in the name of hedonism, but of collective catharsis and mourning.

At a time when the fabric of society often feels frayed, our institutions unstable, and our identities both freed and bereft of inherited cultural structure, this Burning Man-born tradition has been able to offer some solace. By all means, many aspects of the festival and what’s come out of it are inherently wasteful: Holding a costly party in an inaccessible corner of the Earth is without doubt hedonism of a very questionable form. But from the dust have also sprung new or reimagined schools of thought, ways to rejoice, and ways to mourn that offer respite far beyond the playa.

I often recall the moment I took shelter from an oncoming dust storm in a tent containing an open coffin and a sign commanding ‘Eulogize Her’. I climbed in and lay down. Strangers soon filed in behind me and diligently followed suit. Together, we mourned a mysterious ‘her’ we didn’t know, briefly bound by the simple fact of being alive on this strange planet encircling the sun.