''Artist's Shit'' (Italian: ) is a 1961 anti-artwork by Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90

tin can A steel can, tin can, tin (especially in British English, Australian English, Canadian English and South African English), or can is a container made of thin metal, for distribution or storage of goods. Some cans are opened by removing the to ...

s, each reportedly filled with of

feces Feces (also known as faeces American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, or fæces; : faex) are the solid or semi-solid remains of food that was not digested in the small intestine, and has been broken down by bacteria in the ...

, and measuring , with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating:

Inspiration and interpretations

At the time the piece was created, Manzoni was producing works that explored the relationship between art production and human production, ''Artist's Breath'' (), a series of balloons filled with his own breath, being an example. In December 1961, Manzoni wrote in a letter to his friend Ben Vautier: Another friend, Enrico Baj, said that the cans were meant as "an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism". ''Artist's Shit'' has been interpreted in relation to

Karl Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...

's idea of

commodity fetishism In Marxist philosophy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the economic relationships of production and exchange as relationships among things (money and merchandise) rather than among people. As a form of Reification (Marxism), reificati ...

and

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...

's readymades. In September 2021, YBA artist

Gavin Turk Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British artist from Guildford in Surrey, and was considered to be one of the Young British Artists. Turk's oeuvre deals with issues of authenticity and identity, engaged with modernist and avant-garde debates surround ...

made a piece called "Artist's Piss" where he canned his own urine and sold it for its weight in silver.

Value

A tin was sold for €124,000 at

Sotheby's Sotheby's ( ) is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine art, fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...

on May 23, 2007. In October 2008, tin 83 was offered for sale at Sotheby's with an estimate of £50,000–70,000. It sold for £97,250. On October 16, 2015, tin 54 was sold at Christies for £182,500. In August 2016, at an art auction in Milan, one of the tins sold for a new record of €275,000, including auction fees. The tins were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold – $37 each in 1961 – with the price fluctuating according to the market.

Contents of the cans

One of Manzoni's former friends, Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster. The cans are steel, and thus cannot be x-rayed or scanned to determine the contents, and opening a can would cause it to lose its value; as a result, the true contents of ''Artist's Shit'' are unknown. Bernard Bazile exhibited a partially opened can of ''Artist's Shit'' in 1989, titling it ''Opened can of Piero Manzoni'' (). The can's contents were difficult to identify on sight, being variously described as "paper wrapping with unidentified contents", "an unidentifiable wrapped object", and "a can within a can". Bazile did not attempt to extract or open the inner object. The piece received media coverage due to a lawsuit in the mid-1990s, when an art museum in

Randers Randers () is a city in Randers Municipality, Central Denmark Region on the Jutland peninsula. It is List of cities and towns in Denmark, Denmark's sixth-largest city, with a population of 64,511 ().Danish krone The krone (; plural: ''kroner''; sign: kr.; code: DKK) is the official currency of Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands, introduced on 1 January 1875. Both the ISO code "DKK" and currency sign "kr." are in common use; the former precedes ...

r settlement to the collector, approximately US$35,000.

References

Sources

*''Neue Zürcher Zeitung'', Nr. 89.76

External links