1 Art into Ashes: the K Foundation’s Burn a Million Quid Alev Adil This paper explores the shifting and dynamic relationship between the meanings ascribed to practices and products of ‘art’, everyday life and ‘popular culture’. The ideological struggle over the (media) spaces in which value and identity are articulated and validated and the demarcation lines drawn between art, media spectacle and consumer culture are explored through an examination of Bill Drummond and Jim Cauty’s work as the group KLF and their ‘art’ interventions as the K Foundation. In their 1993 intervention in relation to the Turner Prize they awarded Rachel Whiteread double the £20,000Turner Prize money as the ‘worst’ artist in the UK. Her reaction to the award and that of the art world and mainstream media made apparent that whilst their theoretical challenge to the canonical values of the Turner Prize was a familiar one in art discourse, from Duchamp to Debord, their ambiguous position in the cultural field (as commercially successful musicians rather than artists) made their actions hard to place, and therefore to read. Their actions were not accorded the privileges extended to artists challenging the boundaries of art but dismissed as part of a ‘low brow’ anti-intellectual critique of contemporary art. Bourdieu’s topography of taste provides some structural framework for analysing the differing reactions to the Turner Prize as an institution, the Turner Prize intervention and to Rachel Whiteread’s House and the K Foundation’s subsequent Burn a Million Quid and the contested meanings that accrued around these works. The cultural place, often rigidly exclusionary boundaries and institutionalised nature of ‘art’, its (supplicatory) relation to consumer culture and to the mass media’s role as both provocateur and policeman of cultural fields is explored through an examination of the cultural place and challenging meanings of Burn a Million Quid.