(ANSA) - NEW YORK, MAY 18 - PieroManzoni's "Artist's Shit" turns 60 this May and in New York the Houser and Wirth gallery celebrates the anniversary with a special issue of its Ursula magazine and with videos in which artists, curators and collectors describe the importance of the irreverent work both from a personal point of view and in the panorama of the history of the art of the twentieth century.
"The most trivial question, 'what's inside that box', continues to have fun because there is still no answer", says collector Walter Baldi, according to which "there will never be an answer", while the box increases in value: from the equivalent of 30 grams of gold when Manzon produced the work, to 10 thousand grams of the precious metal:"The idea would be the creator himself, that little genius".
Participating in the roundup, among others, the artist JudithBerstein, according to whom "Artist's Shit" has "widened the definition of art", and Carlos Basualdo, head of the contemporary art section at the Museum of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, who frames "Artist's Shit "in the context of the panorama of pop art:" It precedes by a year the 'Campbell Soup' with which Warhol made a similar stance on the relationship between goods and art ".
Houser and Wirth dedicated two parallel exhibitions in 2019 to the most significant works of Manzoni, a precursor of conceptual art who died less than thirty years old in 1963.
(ANSA).