Artist's Shit
Artist's Shit (Italian: "Merda d'artista") is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each 30 grams and measuring 4.8x6.5cm, with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating:
Artist's Shit
Contents 30 gr net
Freshly preserved
Produced and tinned
in May 1961
At the time the piece was created Manzoni was producing works that explored the relationship between art production and human production, Artist's Breath ("Fiato d'artista"), a series of balloons filled with Manzoni's breath, being an example.
A tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby's on May 23 2007; in October 2008 tin 083 was offered for sale at Sotheby's with an estimate of £50-70,000. It sold for £97,250. The cans were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold — $37 each in 1961 — with the price fluctuating according to the market.
One of Manzoni's collaborators, Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster; in contrast Manzoni's girlfriend Nanda Vigo, who helped him produce the cans, claimed the contents really were faeces. Vigo's assertion is disputed by Manzoni's brother and sister. An art dealer from the Gallery Blu in Milan claims to have detected a fecal odour emanating from a can.
The piece received media coverage due to a lawsuit in the mid-1990's, 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 warm temperatures. The lawsuit ended with the museum paying a DKK 250,000 settlement to the collector.
