Artist's Shit
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Artist's Shit (Italian: Script error: No such module "Lang".) is a 1961 anti-artwork by Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each reportedly filled with Script error: No such module "convert". of feces, and measuring Script error: No such module "convert"., 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 (Script error: No such module "Lang".), 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:Template:Bquote
Another friend, Enrico Baj, said that the cans were meant as "an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism".[1] Artist's Shit has been interpreted in relation to Karl Marx's idea of commodity fetishism and Marcel Duchamp's readymades.[2][3] In September 2021, YBA artist Gavin Turk made a piece called "Artist's Piss" where he canned his own urine and sold it for its weight in silver.[4]
Value
A tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby's on May 23, 2007.[5] 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.[6] 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.[2]
Contents of the cans
One of Manzoni's former friends, Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster.[7] 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.[8] Bernard Bazile exhibited a partially opened can of Artist's Shit in 1989,[2] titling it Opened can of Piero Manzoni (Template:Langx). The can's contents were difficult to identify on sight, being variously described as "paper wrapping with unidentified contents", "an unidentifiable wrapped object",[2] and "a can within a can".[9] 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, Denmark, was accused by art collector John Hunov of causing leakage of a can which had been on display at the museum in 1994. Allegedly, the museum had stored the can at irresponsibly high temperatures. The lawsuit ended with the museum paying a 250,000 Danish kroner settlement to the collector, approximately US$35,000.[10]
See also
References
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Sources
- Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Nr. 89.76