I appreciate the kind words. My anger at their actions comes from how coddled from reality they had to be to make such a choice. The levers of monetary supply and demand, of course, 'make' and 'destroy' much larger sums on a daily basis. But those aren't liquid values under control of a single person, either. Money that is, is much more salient, and more valuable. And they just pissed it away.
Did they piss it away though? That single statement was so powerful it's still causing emotional arguments about it 20 years later. Can you say that about other things people spent £1m on in 1994?
> That single statement was so powerful it's still causing emotional arguments about it 20 years later.
I hate this argument, because it's worse than vacuous: It makes out that art is about as meaningful as a gunshot in a crowded room. Is that art? It'll damn well get a reaction, especially from the person who was just shot. Shouldn't we demand more from art? Like actual meaning and maybe, just maybe, a positive impact on the world?
Or should the next art piece be a car bomb in front of the Louvre?
Yes, burning a million pounds is comparable to a gunshot because a million pounds could save a life, so destroying a million pounds might well have ended one, in terms of opportunity cost. And no, you don't get to handwave that away by pointing to other people doing things, any more than a serial killer gets to exculpate themself by pointing to tobacconists. People do things with consequences, and then have to live with those consequences, and the members of the KLF are getting off easy.
> Shouldn't we demand more from art? Like actual meaning and maybe, just maybe, a positive impact on the world?
I'm too young to have heard about the KLF when they did it. But learning about it later - the emotional response it triggers, the questions it poses about the nature of money, about personal responsibility to society, and the extent to which it reveals the hypocrisy of people who are outraged - I think it's an incredibly powerful act. Certainly far more powerful than a random shooting.
You seem to have missed most of this debate. Is the rapper who bought a $200M mansion also akin to murdering 200 people?
What about the other hundreds of thousands of rich wasting their millions? Why are these guys the target of your anger now, and not the one driving a Bentley you just passed around the corner?
I wasn’t handwaving it away by pointing at “other people doing bad things”. I’m questioning your definition of bad, equating money wasted to death, and how far can you take that analogy.
How different is spending $1m vs burning $1m for art? Why aren’t all museums closed and the proceeds given to charity? By the same measure of yours, The Louvre could save 35000 people.
And by the way, us having this discussion here in 2023 is the value/impact of their art.
The lifesaving potential of Great Britain was exactly the same before and after they burnt the money. Same number of hospitals and doctors. Same amount of food and housing. Etc, etc.
The money supply of Great Britain was recently 3,598,911 million pounds down from around 3,700,000 million pounds, [1] a difference 100,000 times as great as what the KLF did. Are you 100,000x as outraged because of that change in the money supply? Are you perhaps 3.6 million times as outraged because all that money isn't being used to save lives?
I'm guessing not. You might think about why you so intensely blame them and not all the other people who could be spending their money more in line with your values.
For me, their message was that art scene is dominate by money. In fact the entire world is dominated by money. Yes you might do a lot of good with a million quid but humans tend to do bad things when given a choice.
Now if someone is uncomfortable or doesn't understand this message then yes it was just a gunshot.
I found a lot of meaning in the symbolic gesture. Not everyone derived a negative from it. For me it was a positive impact learning that their existed a radical group with balls enough to stick a big fat fuck you to the money machine of the world..
Would you be happier if they'd used the money for startup seed funding with a view to eventually cashing out after IPO?
I suspect a lot of people are offended that in a supposedly free capitalist culture they had - and presumably still have - the freedom to subvert the usual rules.
In capitalism artists are either supposed to be poor and struggling, or fragile gilded celebrities cocooned in enviable opulence. Both options are defined by money.
It's a shock to the system for a successful artist to act with self-determination and to dramatise control over capital instead of being controlled by it.
For sure. A16Z alone has wasted far, far more money than this. As has Donald Trump. Or Sergey and Larry. But that's the "correct" kind of wasting money.
Even if we look only at "liquid values under control of a single person", this was a tiny, tiny fraction of the UK's stock of money. I can't find M3 numbers for back then, but currently this would be 0.0000027% of money. It would be hard to argue that this was the worst spent million, or even in the bottom decile.
I'd say what they got for it was a lot of people questioning and discussing the value and purpose of money. For decades! Given that so much of our culture is supportive of acquisition regardless of harm, it could be argued that a million pounds of anti-greed propaganda was one of the most socially positive things they could have done with it.
And even if we don't go that far, even if we discount the social value of art to 0, they still provided a hell of a lot of public entertainment for a million pounds. The latest Rolling Stones tour costs about 100m pounds. Major blockbusters cost 100-300m pounds each. Many indie films will cost more than 1m GBP. Compared with that, this looks like excellent value for money, and here nobody had to buy a ticket.
So I think at the very least there are much worse uses of money to be mad about. But if you'd still prefer this one, I imagine they'd be fine with that. Stoking outrage was clearly one of the intended goals of the project, and they wouldn't have achieved their goals without it.
Just speaking my personal opinion- it's still a a waste, but at least the money would have been put back in to circulation. Better than burning it, at least.
