ART FOR ART’S SAKE… (AND CUTTING THRU)….

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. BREAK THE EMPIRE'S STRANGLEHOLD ON INFORMATION.

L'artista Piero Manzoni (1933-1963)

GARY CORSERI

In 2007, Sotheby’s

auctioned a can of artist’s shit*

for 180,000 dollars.

“Sophisticated,” “cultured” types

clamored to buy a tin of shit

an auction house called “Art.”

In the “market place of ideas”

no one demurred

that a thousand hungry kids

could eat all winter

on the money a jackass paid

for another jackass’s shit!

In our turvy world of razzmatazz,,

“A little learning is a dang’rous thing”

and most of what we “know”

we do not know,

(or know by rote,

or from a meme picked up like a virus

from an infected lover).

“Test axioms on the pulses,” Keats advised--

(with the usual genius-disregard

for others being as wise as he.

(“Axiom? What’s axiom?”)

Against this moral turpitude

where anything that sells is “art,”

and leggy girls sell “news” between

a pharmaceutical haze and sheen,

the soul struggles not to be subsumed

by tawdry trinkets of acknowledgment.

“The true poet,” Owen wrote,

“must be a witness,” sound alarms.

(He watched men retch and writhe

from mustard gas.

He wrote it down, then died

just short of Armistice.)

“Listen!” the sanctimonious judge intones

“has the same letters as…”--solemnly intoning—

“silent!” she concludes,

berating the perplexed defendant,

seeking to expound,

seeking…absolution?

I want to say, “tinsel, also….”

Every concession to fraudulence

abominates the soul,

chips at our humanity

and we become

cheap, plastic chips

on a Roulette table wagered

for 30 silver pieces.

Day by day we weave

a web of lies

and demos plays 2^nd fiddle

because the final score’s a riddle

only the Conductor knows;

or…if we have the will,

cutting thru

obsessions of the sickened mind,

and all chicanery,

we build

a web of diamond beads—

each reflecting each;

polishing, refining,

(if we have the will

and minds to learn

and will to heal),

testing diamonds on the glass of fashion,

cutting through

refining, refining…polishing

universal diamond beads

of truth.

(Author’s note: Earlier versions of this poem appeared at Dissident Voice and The Smirking Chimp in 2013.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Corseri has published and posted articles, fiction and poems at hundreds of venues, including The Greanville Post, UncomonThoughtJournal, Counterpunch, The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook Magazine, The Palestine Chronicle, and Georgia Review. He has published 2 novels and 2 collections of poetry, and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. He has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum, and he has taught in universities in the US and Japan, and in US public schools and prisons. Contact: Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.

* Addendum
Was the poet being simply naughty? The story behind what seems like a bad joke, and it is.
Click on the orange button to examine the back story.

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* Artist’s Shit (Italian: Merda d’artista) is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each filled with 30 grams (1.1 oz) of faeces, and measuring 4.8 by 6.5 centimetres (1.9 in × 2.6 in), with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating:

Artist’s Shit
Contents 30 gr net
Freshly preserved
Produced and tinned
in May 1961

Value & Content
A tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby’s on May 23, 2007;^[5] in October 2008 tin 83 was offered for sale at Sotheby’s with an estimate of £50–70,000. It sold for £97,250. On October 16, 2015, tin 54 was sold at Christies for £182,500. In August 2016, at an art auction in Milan, one of the tins sold for a new world record of €275,000, including auction fees.^[6] The tins were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold – $37 each in 1961 – with the price fluctuating according to the market.^[1]

One of Manzoni’s friends, the artist Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster.^[7] The cans are steel, and thus cannot be x-rayed or scanned to determine the contents, and opening a can would cause it to lose its value; thus, the true contents of Artist’s Shit are unknown.^[8] Bernard Bazile exhibited an opened can of Artist’s Shit in 1989, titling it Opened can of Piero Manzoni (French: Boite ouverte de Piero Manzoni). The can contained an unidentifiable, wrapped object, which Bazile did not open. There are rumors that some cans have exploded and that there is one can within the can.^[1]

Origins & inspiration?

At the time the piece was created, Manzoni was producing works that explored the relationship between art production and human production, Artist’s Breath (“Fiato d’artista”), a series of balloons filled with his own breath, being an example.

Manzoni’s father, who owned a cannery, is said to have once told his artist son: “Your work is shit.”^[1]

In December 1961, Manzoni wrote in a letter to his friend Ben Vautier:

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. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit, that is really his.^[2]

^{Manzoni died of myocardial infarction in his Milan studio in 1963, barely 29 years of age.}

Source: Wikipedia

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