The work of art that didn't do what it said on the tin

When the Italian artist Piero Manzoni put his excrement into tin cans in the early 1960s and offered it as art, he said that he was exposing “the gullibility of the art-buying public”.

Collectors and galleries that paid high prices for the tins — including the Tate — appeared even more gullible yesterday when it emerged that they contained not faeces, but plaster.



The tin at the Tate, for which the gallery paid £22,300 in 2000, is labelled Merda d’Artis-ta (Artist’s Shit) 1961. Described by the Tate as a seminal work, it was No 4 of 90 cans made by Manzoni, each supposedly containing 30 grams of his excrement. A buyer paid €124,000 (£84,000) at an auction in Milan last month for tin No 18.

Manzoni once said that he hoped that the cans would explode, and about half are reported to have done so. But none of the owners have revealed the contents. The cans, owned by the Tate, the Pompidou museum in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, are intact.

The Tate said yesterday that its can remained valid as a work of art. “Keeping the viewer in suspense is part of the subversive humour of the work,” a spokesperson said.