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> 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.

> It makes out that art is about as meaningful as a gunshot in a crowded room. Is that art?

Chris Burden thought so!

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot_(Burden)

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 said you can't handwave this away by pointing at other people.

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.

You aren't quite getting how money works.

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.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/money-supply-m3

> The lifesaving potential of Great Britain was exactly the same before and after they burnt the money.

Yes, but the money was out of the hands of someone who could have used it to leverage that potential for themselves.

And don't just limit it to the UK, with its NHS: The KLF could have donated it overseas.

Huh. Yes, I get your point. But I don't get the sense you're hearing mine.

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..

Art - you either get it, or it gets to you

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.

Desperately trying to justify their actions by saying "other people do things too" is not an argument.