Domenico Quaranta, “Alchemical Sublimations. Authorship, Scarcity and Value, from Merda d’artista to the NFTs”, in Luca Bochicchio, Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo (Eds.), Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista: That Scandalous Can, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, February 2025, pp.265-288. ISBN: 1-0364-1746-8
Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista: That Scandalous Can is the first comprehensive scholarly book on Piero Manzoni’s “Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit)”, one of the most provocative and misunderstood works of contemporary art. Often compared to Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), Manzoni’s work has been both scandalous and influential, marking a turning point in 1960s conceptualism. The book presents the latest research on “Merda d’artista”, revealing its hidden meanings and stories, all verified. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including Art History, Philosophy, Sociology, Chemistry, and Economics, the book compiles papers from an international conference held in Verona, Italy, in March 2023. Organized by the Fondazione Piero Manzoni and the University of Verona, this work summarizes years of research on this iconic work, part of which available on the website “merdadartista.org.” It is designed to introduce an international audience to the profound impact and significance of Manzoni’s controversial art.
My essay could be described as an articulate attempt to answer a twofold question: can Merda d’artista help understand NFTs? Can NFTs solicit new, unprecedented keys for interpreting Merda d’artista? What follows is an excerpt from the second chapter of the text.
The pact
“When I knocked on the door of his room, he came out of the hotel toilet, wearing a blue dressing gown with white polka dots. He said to me simply, shaking my hand: ‘I was in the toilet working, to have some MERDA D’ARTISTA to sell. If the prospective buyer of one of my cans of shit finds the price too high, I offer to sell him my shit at the weight he wants, wrapped in a sheet of toilet paper, after I spoon it out of the toilet.’”
It is hard to say whether the anecdote handed down by Bernard Aubertin1 is authentic. Its incontrovertible efficacy nonetheless lies in having located the value of Merda d’artista in a pact, an active collaboration between creator and spectator-collector. The alternative hypothesised by Manzoni places the moment of definitive transmutation not in the act (creative, reserved for the artist) of canning, and in the related acts of signing and titling, but in the act (spectator-consumerist, delegated to the buyer) of the purchase – or better still, of the acceptation of the price (“if the eventual buyer… finds the price too high”). In other words, Merda d’artista does not become a work of art at the original creative moment (the excretory act), nor even at the secondary creative moment (the inventive act of canning); but only at the moment when the spectator accepts, by paying the exchange value of 30 grams of gold, that the box contains shit; that the shit is Piero Manzoni’s; that Merda d’artista is a work of art, that is to say, that the process of “framing” to which the original material has been subjected has transmuted into art the outcome of an excretory act; that as a work of art, Merda d’artista has an economic value greater than that of the materials of which it is composed. There is more, however: in accepting the artist’s proposal, the purchaser effectively completes the work, making factual the magical (or rather, alchemical) transformation of the “base” work into gold. Only through collaboration with a third party can the proposed equivalence of the price of artist’s shit and gold become fact, a shared and concrete reality.
In this way, Manzoni demonstrated that he had taken on board the ideas regarding the active role of the spectator proposed by Marcel Duchamp on various occasions2 and which would come to converge, in 1968, in Barthes’ theory on the death of the author:
“A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”3
Manzoni actually goes even further, attributing a crucial function to a specific form of fruition, which does not take place through the simple act of looking or reading, but through the commercial act of purchasing, anticipating the growing influence of the art market over the following decades in attributing the status of art to works that do not manifest any intrinsic artistic nature.
It may be enlightening, at this point, to examine the episode of the most well-known digital content associated with an NFT: Everydays.The First 5000 Days, sold by Christies on the 11th of March 2022 for more than 69 million dollars. The work is a grid collage that brings together into a single .jpg file 5,000 separate images, published daily and distributed free of charge by the American illustrator Beeple on his social media channels between the 1st of May 2007 and the 7th of January 2021. The project began when Beeple – a pseudonym for Mike Winkelmann – barely knew how to draw, as a learning path through daily practice and production. With a degree in computer science (2003) but lacking any artistic training – and, by his own admission, no knowledge of or interest in the art world – Beeple doggedly built up his knowledge of digital production tools – from Photoshop to 3D modelling and animation tools – and over time acquired a recognisable and personal style, which earned him a large following on social media and a few good opportunities as a commercial illustrator. His work is described on his website beeple-crap.com as follows:
“he makes a variety of art crap across a variety of media. some of it is ok, but a lot of it kind of blows ass. he’s working on making it suck less everyday though so bear with him… :)”
This description, combined with the quotidian and regular nature of the gesture of producing and publishing a digital image, already suggests more than one analogy between the content of his collage and that of Piero Manzoni’s cans.
In 2020, Beeple discovered the NFT market and achieved several respectable sales on specialist platforms such as Nifty Gateway. These successes attracted the attention of Noah Davis, then the head of online sales at Christie’s, who was to organize the Everydays auction. The sale took place on the 25th of February 2021, with a bid start price of 100 dollars. The work was clearly “undervalued” with respect to the prices already achieved by Beeple on the NFT market4, but this was a well-judged decision. We should remember, in fact, that Christie’s was auctioning a .jpg file freely downloadable at full resolution, the cultural value of which is not certified by any authority (gallery, museum, critic or collector) in the art world, and whose economic value depends exclusively on the recognition of the validity of a technological certification – the tokenregistered on blockchain – which is associated with an exchange system of dubious reputation – cryptocurrencies, supported for the moment only by a handful of cryptoinvestors who define themselves as “collectors”.
Like Merda d’artista, Everydays only begins to exist as a work of art thanks to the active collaboration of a viewer-purchaser; unlike Merda d’artista, this does not depend on a conceptual device within the logic of the work, but on its material nature (that is, its existence as a reproducible digital file) and the questionable roles of its creator and those who support it in the territory of art. To adopt Beeple’s terminology, Everydays is a collection of “digital crap”, the sublimation of which involves a complex series of passages and affects not only the work of art but also the entire techno-social infrastructure on which it relies.
The purchaser of Everydays, or any other digital good associated with an NFT, must firstly believe not only in the cultural/economic value of the work, but also in the NFT’s ability to certify, without any shadow of a doubt and without the possibility of alteration, the provenance, uniqueness and ownership of the good. The transaction takes place between two wallets, that of the owner and that of the purchaser, instantaneously thanks to the mediation of a smart contract. Given that in a system of disintermediation, there is no external authority validating the wallets (that is, guaranteeing that the person mintingan NFT is actually the author of the work or a trusted intermediary), there is actually no guarantee of the authorship and authenticity of the artefact. This means that the purchase of an NFT is always the fruit of a dual act of faith: towards the author, that is, the original wallet that did the minting and towards the techno-financial system creating the conditions for the purchase, in other words, the blockchain.
In the original NFT ecosystem – which for the sake of convenience we could date prior to the Everydays auction – each party had every interest in honouring this agreement: the “artists” are creators without a market and without the legitimacy of the art world; the “collectors” are crypto-investors with huge budgets, who stand to benefit greatly from the success of the NFT model. Purchasing an NFT means, for them, building up the economic value of an artist who has none and demonstrating their faith in a system that, from the outside, still raises many doubts. Those standing on the outside of this game see the economic value (the millions invested in an artist with no pedigree) and presume that there must be cultural value there; they see the amount of money that is paid out for a digital certificate of ownership and presume that the system is infallible. In this way, those outside the game become potential new investors.
It is at this precise point that Christie’s arrives to play its part. The auction house with the longest tradition in the world makes available its global platform for the Everydays performance. It uses its authority and reputation in the art world to vouch for the cultural value of Beeple and the security of the NFT system, while legitimising cryptocurrencies in the face of the world of mainstream economics. The $69 million paid by Metakovan is the investment with which the cryptocurrency world spectacularly maximises the impact of this process of legitimisation.
The “post-Beeple” era will see the introduction of many changes; but even today, the acquisition of an NFT involves the implicit signing of a twofold “pact”: the recognition of the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies (even if the purchase is made with a credit card and a national currency, it is the cryptocurrency economy that ultimately determines the economic value of the purchase) and the recognition of the NFT’s ability to make scarce and valuable that which is, by its nature, abundant and worthless (the digital good).
1 Bernard Aubertin, “Sur Piero Manzoni”, Robho, No. 3, (Spring 1968); orig. “Quand je frappai à la porte de sa chambre, sortait des w.-c. de l’hôtel, vêtu d’une robe de chambre bleue foncée à pois blancs. Il me dit simplement en me tendant la main: «J’étais aux w.-c. pour travailler, pour avoir de la MERDE D’ARTISTE à vendre. Si l’acheteur éventuel d’une de mes boîtes de merde trouve le prix trop élevé, je propose de lui vendre ma merde au poids désiré par lui, enveloppée dans une feuille de papier hygiénique, après l’avoir retirée de la cuvette des w.-c. à la petite cuillère.»”
2 Cf. for example: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” In Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act”, 1957; published in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet, Elmer Peterson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), 138-140.
3 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, Manteia (1968). Published in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London, Fontana Press, 1977).
4 On the 1st of November 2020 another work by Beeple, sold as a unique piece on the Nifty Gateway platform, was acquired for $66,000; put up for auction again by its owner on the 25th of February 2021 it was acquired by a collector acting under a pseudonym for $6.6 million. Cf. https://www.niftygateway.com/marketplace/item/0x12f28e2106ce8fd8464885b80ea865e98b465149/100010001.