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Meet the artist who became famous for selling his own poop

An artist stunned the world after coming up with the rather bizarre idea of selling his poop in the name of art.

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“Artist’s Shit” is a collection of 30g tin cans allegedly containing the poop of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni.

Art collectors have since been buying them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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When Piero Manzoni decided to can his own poop, in 1961, he probably had no idea that his 30g metal containers would one day be sold at such huge prices.

In 2007, the Tate art gallery in London bought one of Manzoni’s 90 cans for £22,350 ($30,000). In that same year, another can of “Merda d’Artista” was auctioned off in Milan, for a whopping £81,000 ($108,000). And note this: Manzoni’s cans of poop are currently worth around $300,000 apiece.

Who was Piero Manzoni?

He was said to be originally an aristocratic Italian artist specializing in conventional painting. However, things changed in January 1957, when he visited an exhibition of Yves Klein’s blue paintings at Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. The display of canvas after canvas of simple blue paint impacted the 23-year-old Manzoni, and changed his perception of art completely.

Even before creating the work he would become most famous for, “Merda d’Artista” (Artist’s Shit) Manzoni had already produced other unconventional artworks including a series of hard-boiled eggs signed with his thumbprint, and a series of balloons inflated by him, called “Artist’s Breath”.

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For his “Merda d’Artista”, he took advantage of his father’s can factory and created a collection of 90 tin cans, all signed by him and labeled as “Artist’s Shit, Freshly Preserved, Produced and Tinned in May 1961”.

Each can contained 30g of poop and was originally priced according to the gold market at the time.

So what’s the point of “Merda d’Artista?”

Manzoni canned his poop to highlight and satirize how gullible post-WW2 art collectors were. There was an economic boom at the time, and so many of them were willing to spend huge sums of money on virtually anything. But Manzoni did not envisage that his artwork would end up selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Sadly, Manzoni did not get the chance to enjoy his success as he died in 1963, at the age of 29.

But do “Artist’s Shit” cans actually contain Manzoni’s waste, or anyone’s waste, for that matter?

Agostino Bonalumi, who worked with the Italian artist, said that the containers are filled with plaster.

“I can assure everyone the contents were only plaster,” Bonalumi told Corriere della Sera. “If anyone wants to verify this, let them do so.”

But the thing is, no one is willing to open one of the cans to see the contents, with many believing that the mystery is actually a big part of the artwork’s charm.

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Questions have, however, been raised as to the authenticity of Manzoni’s art, with others wondering why the “Artist’s Shit” tins should cost so much when it’s probably not what it portrays to be.

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