For all of its insane growth, creeping capitalism, and occasional insufferability, writes Jillian Steinhauer, the desert festival largely continues to uphold its “‘radically participatory ethic,’ the idea that there are no spectators because everyone can and should be involved in building the contents of Black Rock City.” The problem, when you try to put art from the festival into, say, a Smithsonian museum, is that “casual as they may try to be, art museums are, at the end of the day, uptight. They’re object repositories and arbiters of taste and culture. This makes them an uneasy fit with the rigorous populism of Burning Man, where everyone’s expression of creativity is welcome, no matter how primitive.”