The Madness of fools SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
peter
By Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 30/06/2002)
Critics of modern art will at least applaud the irony. The Tate Gallery
has paid £22,300 of public money for a work that is, quite literally, a
load of excrement.
The canned faeces of Piero Manzoni, one of Italy's most controversial
artists, have been bought by the gallery from a sale at Sotheby's.
Pile of crap: each can contains 30 grams of Manzoni excrement
Can 004 is one of an "edition" of 90 tins of merda d'artista created by
Manzoni in 1961 as an ironic statement on the art market. Each can
contained 30 grams of his faeces and Manzoni sold it for the same price
as if it were gold.
The price paid by the Tate for its merda - £745 per gram - exceeds,
however, the £550 that the contents of the tin would cost if they were
made of 24-carat gold.
The gallery yesterday defended its decision to spend taxpayers' money on
the work. The money for the purchase came from the Tate's acquisitions
budget, which it receives from the Government.
"The Manzoni was a very important purchase for an extremely small amount
of money: nobody can deny that," said a spokesman for the gallery.
"He was an incredibly important international artist. What he was doing
with this work was looking at a lot of issues that are pertinent to
20th-century art, like authorship and the production of art. It was a
seminal work."
The purchase is not the only excreta the Tate has in its collection; it
has also bought three paintings by Chris Ofili featuring elephant dung.
Although the tin was bought in the Italian art sale at Sotheby's some
time ago, the gallery has kept secret the amount it paid. It put the can
on display last year without making any public announcement.
Last week the gallery denied that it had tried to play down the
purchase. "We buy 500 works a year so we can't talk about every one,"
said the spokesman.
Manzoni died, aged just 29, within two years of creating his tinned art.
He was a hard drinker and his alcohol consumption led to him to suffer
from a liver condition. In a letter to a friend, he explained that his
motivation for tinning his faeces was to expose the gullible nature of
the art-buying public.
"I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage
competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in
tins," he wrote. "If collectors really want something intimate, really
personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit. That is really
his."
The cans were sealed according to industrial standards and then
circulated to museums around the world.
In addition to the Tate, both the Pompidou Museum in Paris and the
Museum of Modern Art in New York have bought cans since. At least 45 of
the original 90 cans have exploded, however. This is exactly what
Manzoni intended.
Soon after he created the cans he told a friend "I hope these cans
explode in the vitrines of the collectors." The Tate Gallery says that
it has had no such problems.
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peter