Arms covered in dust, crowds of men recently took a break just outside the site while still wearing their hard hats and bright yellow construction vests, smoking cigarettes or arguing about sports in both English and Spanish.
It lasts for several months, getting maximum attention for the artists from the widest possible audiences which is why, for all those who complain about the heat, dust, crowds and slog across several Venetian islands, it remains the most important art event of them all.
Propelled by smoke and dust, the crowd emptied out onto West 22nd Street, where they were met with another curious sight.
At the Bacardi Untamable Stage, Borgore assembled his #BorgoreArmy and redefined the Kodak moment by dropping Nati's remix of "Pyramids" by DVBBS and Dropgun to a dust coated crowd.
The pursuit of India's elite is to protect themselves from India — from its crowds, dust, heat, poverty, politics, governance and everything else that is in plain sight.
Perhaps they were thinking of the temperatures that often hit 40C, the dust and the crowds, the ever-present threat of a stomach upset.
Kuka's camera is often immersed within groups and circles of people – the camera's view caught up in the haze of dust rising by crowds of stamping and dancing feet.
And suddenly she is gone, lost in the multitudes on a gruelling 7km (4.5-mile) walk which takes two hours to finish in the heat and dust and milling crowds and the narrow streets of Howrah, aflame with the flags and bunting of her party and her rivals.
On Sunday afternoon, for example, just as the crowd is beginning to flag, the Bearded Kittens step onto the Great Stage and promptly fire hundreds of bags of fluorescent paint dust into the crowd, starting a mass paint fight.
Fair enough, because when it's finally time for the show to start Allen flies in on a broomstick, blows magic dust over the crowd and turns us all into frogs... or maybe I just made that up.
Plummeting bodies, starving children and dead men in the dust tend to crowd out the reassuring images of soldiers reunited with their families and policemen being nice to little boys.
