Marxist criticism of commodity fetishism is manifested here in a limited edition of 90 cans, which were numbered consecutively by the artist and labeled with information about net weight (30 g), type of conservation, and date of filling in multiple languages – English, German, French, and Italian. The standard industrial packaging and labeling make the artwork appear like everyday consumer items. The commodity value of the cans was supposed to correspond to the current market value of a Fine Ounce of gold, the price that Manzoni sold them for at the time. Thus, Merda d’artista, among its numerous interpretations, could stand for the “disappearance of both the gold standard and the taste standard” (J.-F. Lyotard, Petit Journal).
Manzoni’s conceptual work, interpreted as a direct and iconoclastic appraisal of value production in the art world, is an inevitable reverberation of Duchamp’s readymades as post-war consumerism that had been unleashed by the dawn of the 1960s. After his achromatic paintings, with which Manzoni “forms the third step of abstraction, which brought painting even closer to the border of its elimination” (Peter Weibel, Iconoclash), he explored the representation of the artist by direct material relation to the artwork in, for example, the Artist’s Breath (1960).
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