Art reflects the culture of the people who produced it. We live in the Progressive Age and what passes for art reflects the bland, transactional conformity of our times. Modern artists think and act like global retailers. They find a target audience and produce product for it. Performers set out to flatter their audience by pandering to their worst instincts. Being a trendy Progressive means carefully repeating lines from the catechism at the prescribed moments.

In one of life’s many ironies, it is outside the hive where the weirdos live and where the fun is. Grover Norquist is a fairly despicable person, but he not a liberal. He’s also fairly typical of what you find on the right these days, as far as diversity. People outside the hive like weird and enjoy being weird. It’s conservative, middle American audiences that drive the success of cutting edge TV shows like True Detective or Breaking Bad.

This piece seems to support that assertion.

What is Burning Man?

It is a larger version of … what? Woodstock? That was a bunch of teenagers coming to watch artists perform. At Burning Man, everyone is expected to be a participant. Burners bring their art work, their art cars, their personal dress and/or undress: everyone is on stage. The story of Woodstock was thousands of young people, without the sense to bring their own food and water, being rescued by the state police and sensible bourgeois rural folks. The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance.

It is a more intense than … what? Not quite the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Burning Man is an arts festival in the middle of the Nevada desert. It takes hours to get there, and you must bring what you eat or wear or need: you cannot buy anything there. Burning Man is more like Brigadoon – a western ghost town that springs to life. Dust storms. Cold nights. Black Rock City is completely built and then taken apart and disappeared each year, by 65,000 people.

Burning Man is greater than I had ever imagined. I have been to large demonstrations in favor of the environment, and the trash left behind is knee-deep. At Burning Man, you are hard-pressed to find a cigarette butt on the ground. There are no trash bins. Participants carry it in, and they carry it out. I have been to the Louvre. It is a very big place with many nice paintings. I knew that. I was not disappointed. Burning Man is more like Petra, the lost city in Jordan, which I found more impressive than its advance billing or reputation.

My wife and I had planned to join the “event” in 2012, but some idiot scheduled the Republican National Convention in Tampa for the same week. I objected, but the overlapping bit of the Venn diagram of Burners and Mitt Romney enthusiasts was perhaps not as large as I had thought.

Some self-professed “progressives” whined at the thought of my attending what they believed was a ghetto for liberal hippies. Yes, there was a gentleman who skateboarded without elbow or kneepads – or any knickers whatsover. Yes, I rode in cars dressed-up as cats, bees and spiders; I watched trucks carrying pirate ships and 30 dancers. I drank absinthe. But anyone complaining about a Washington wonk like me at Burning Man is not a Burner himself: The first principle of Burning Man is “radical inclusiveness”, which pretty much rules out the nobody-here-but-us liberals “gated community” nonsense.

It is the first principle of anything truly artsy or cultural. It’s why art is by definition conservative. Only lunatics and barbarians celebrate destruction. It is the lovers of life that capture their times in paintings, buildings and literature. It is the truly conservative soul who wishes to leave memories of his times to those who come after him. Art is, after all, nothing more than a memory passed from one generation to the next.