Would you ever pay a can of excrement the figure of 275,000 euros? This is what happened in 2016, when a small box with an unmistakable label on it was sold for this exorbitant sum at an auction house: “Artist shit. Net content gr. 30. Preserved in natural. Produced and canned in May 1961“. This is a mass-produced work of art, one of the most famous and controversial of contemporary Italian art, created by Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) in 1961: how did he make it and does it actually contain his excrement?
Let’s take a leap back in time: it was a day in 1961, when Piero Manzoni decided to take 90 tin cans (of those used for canned meat), seal them and apply the label we have reported above (translated into four languages: Italian, French, English and German), adding on the upper part of the jar a progressive number from 1 to 90, together with his signature. Manzoni then put the “artist shit“, calculating the price by equating the gold value in grams to that of his theoretical excrements. But what did the Milanese artist, then just 27 years old, but already very famous, want to mean with this work?
According to some critics it was a real rejection of the canon of aesthetic beauty and at the same time of a criticism of the rules imposed on artists from the market economy. To be clear, a criticism of the elitist world that decides how much a work is worth. However, there are those who say that in reality it is neither of the two things, but only one provocation of those typical of artists: Manzoni wanted first of all make you thinkaltering the basic rules of reality and society.
For this same purpose, Piero Manzoni created many other works, often performative (real “actions”): once he signed the base and the body of some real life models who posed as living sculptures, another offered food to the public at one of her exhibitions hard boiled eggs with his fingerprint on themas in a “communion” between author, work and public.
Today, jars of excrement, whose average value is around 70,000 eurosare preserved in several museums and art collections around the world: the Museo del Novecento in Milan, for example, has jar number 80; specimen number 4 is exhibited at the Tate Modern in London; 14 is kept at the MoMA in New York; and 31 is at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
But what is really in those jars? Nobody knows, because opening one to check would mean greatly devaluing the value of the work.
