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.
Now if someone is uncomfortable or doesn't understand this message then yes it was just a gunshot.
Chris Burden thought so!
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.
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?
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.
Art - you either get it, or it gets to you
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
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.
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.