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When the scholars get hold of a countercultural phenomenon, does that signal its impending end?

There will be an opportunity to assess that matter when the Bill Lane Center for the American West, a research institute at Stanford University, presents “Burning Man: Art and Technology,” a two-hour symposium on the festival of creativity and free-spirited fellowship that attracts thousands to the Nevada desert at the end of August for a multiday campout. The program, scheduled for Feb. 23, will be hosted at the de Young Museum, an event co-sponsor.

Speakers include Nora Atkinson, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, who organized last year’s blockbuster exhibition “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man”; Katherine K. Chen, a sociologist at the City College of New York who has studied the festival; Scott London, a Bay Area photographer who has delved deeply into the Burning Man phenomenon; and Fred Turner, a Stanford professor of communications who will deliver the keynote talk, “What Burning Man Does for Silicon Valley.”

Admission is free, but—just like the Burning Man event itself—you’ll have to register in advance. Fire dancing, presumably, will not be allowed in the museum auditorium.