I really love the topic, gets the brain going.

There's even a community of people who go around and burn money. People have destroyed about £8K so far!

https://www.burnyourmoney.org/

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From the past on HN, this one has the most comments I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34649326

If you enjoy Hitchhiker's Guide style comedy radio plays, I'd recommend the slightly fictionalised version of this story available on the BBC:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06y18n2

Sounds exceptionally naive, "artists are meant to struggle". Its also extremely self-centered and egotistic to consider this performance art as some "culture jamming"(as labeled by wikipedia), its more of an upper-class British extravagant behaviour - that is pure hype and self-congratulating rationalization ("its the most powerful thing we could do". They could have done it with fake money, even vaguely money-shaped paper, if all they wanted as some third-rate artistic performance. Its hyper-capitalist showing off their wealth and power, using it in the worst way they could think of. Perhaps the only "artistic" message here is that 'modern artists' are a shallow consumerist culture that revolves around emotional shock value and regurgirating pop-culture.

Maybe that's the message they were going for?

If they just destroyed some fake money would it have such a powerful response?

For me it makes me think about spectacle, attention, what gets people's eyes on something. It gets your attention therefore it has worth. It might be "art" because people talk about it or hate it. If we don't like it should we not pay attention to it?

Like those anti oil protestors, the aim is not to stop oil or disrupt people, it's to get attention to their cause. Thinking more widely this leads me to think about how there's a whole portion of the economy that is devoted to attention.

> its more of an upper-class British extravagant behaviour

Neither Bill Drummond nor Cauty would be considered upper class, this stems more from being students in the 1970s, grifting hard on any job that makes ends meet while working in music, becoming virally rich and wanting to make a statement with money they didn't feel they had earned in a sense.

Drumond has some retrospective thoughts on the burning, mad in hindsight .. but somehow seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ebeneezer Goode may have played a part here.