In August 1961, an Italian artist named Piero Manzoni sealed ninety small tin cans, each one labelled in four languages: Artist’s Shit. Contents 30 grams net. Freshly preserved. Produced and tinned in May 1961. He offered them for sale at Galleria Pescetto in Albisola Marina, priced not by his own judgment, but by weight — pegged to the daily market price of gold.
That price, in 1961, was not floating freely. It was fixed by the London Gold Pool, a consortium of central banks holding the metal at $35.20 an ounce by mutual agreement. Manzoni did not invent a number. He borrowed one. His cans were, quite literally, priced at the central banks’ own fix.
Nobody has ever opened one and lived to confirm the contents. Opening the can would destroy the artwork — its value depends entirely on the label being believed, never tested. Thirty years later, when gold had climbed to $374 an ounce, a can sold at Sotheby’s for $67,000 — roughly seventy times what the original gold-peg formula would have produced. The peg had long since come off. The price kept climbing anyway.
A Sculpture Already Made
Forty-four years earlier, a Frenchman living in New York bought a porcelain urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, turned it on its back, signed it “R. Mutt,” and submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists — an exhibition whose rules guaranteed a place to anyone who paid the entrance fee. The board rejected it anyway, hiding the object from view during the show. Marcel Duchamp resigned from the board in protest and, a few days later, wrote to his sister Suzanne explaining what had happened: a friend of his, he said, had sent in the urinal under a masculine pseudonym, and since there was nothing indecent about it, there had been no reason to reject it.
It is worth sitting with that sentence. Duchamp did not claim authorship in the letter that started it all — he attributed the piece to a friend. Decades of art history would go on to declare the work indisputably his. Some recent scholarship has argued the actual author may have been Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a penniless German performance artist who signed her own work with pseudonyms and who was, by several accounts, the only person in Duchamp’s circle capable of the gesture. The question of who made Fountain has never been settled. The question of who gets credited for it was settled almost immediately, and has not moved since.
Duchamp himself, elsewhere, called the readymades a private joke between himself and a small circle of friends — a test of whether a board of gatekeepers would notice, or dare object. The object cost nothing to make. It required no skill to select. Its entire value lay in one man’s willingness to point at it and declare it art, and in an audience’s willingness, afterward, to agree.
The Mint Nobody Chartered
A currency requires two things to function: an issuing authority, and a public willing to accept the note without demanding to see what stands behind it. By the 1950s, American painting had both.
Frances Stonor Saunders’ 1999 study The Cultural Cold War, drawing on declassified files and interviews with former intelligence officers, documented how the Central Intelligence Agency financed international touring exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting — Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Motherwell — through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a body it covertly funded and controlled. The stated goal was not aesthetic. It was to project an image of individualist, apolitical American freedom against Soviet socialist realism, and to relocate the centre of the art world from Paris to New York.
The Museum of Modern Art, under the presidency of Nelson Rockefeller, amplified the movement domestically. Rockefeller — who also chaired the museum’s board and later described Abstract Expressionism as “free enterprise painting” — began his own collection of the movement he was helping install as the American standard. Life magazine, meanwhile, ran a feature on Jackson Pollock asking whether he was “the greatest living painter in the United States.” The Agency, by later accounts, had a hand in placing it.
None of this required a single critic to certify a single canvas on its own merits. It required an institutional consortium — an intelligence agency, a museum, a family fortune, a mass-circulation magazine — to agree, in coordination, on what would count as the reserve currency of twentieth-century taste. The public, largely unaware of the arrangement, accepted the note.
Lying and Faking
The philosopher Roger Scruton, writing decades later, drew a distinction worth keeping. Lying is simple — anyone can do it, he wrote; it requires only saying something false with the intent to deceive. Faking is harder. Faking requires convincing an audience of a value that isn’t there, and — this is the part that matters — it requires the faker to believe it too, at least while the performance is running. He aimed the observation squarely at Duchamp and Warhol, calling their gestures, in his words, a good joke that had become “downright stupid” by the time a second and third generation of artists were still repeating it without irony, and without a joke left to tell.
A currency works the same way. Nobody involved in issuing a banknote believes gold sits behind it anymore. What they believe, and need the public to believe, is that enough other people believe the note has value that it will keep circulating regardless. The moment that collective faith is what’s actually being priced — not the metal, not the canvas, not the contents of the can — the mechanism of art and the mechanism of money have become the same mechanism, running on the same fuel.
The Fix Comes Off
In 1971, the United States closed the gold window. The dollar’s peg, already more theatre than substance, was formally severed. Currency values were now free to float on faith alone, adjustable by decree, unanchored to anything a citizen could weigh in his hand.
By the 1970s, the art object itself was becoming similarly optional. Performance, concept, and gesture displaced the made thing. The declaration became the entire product. A canvas, a can, a urinal — these had at least been objects you could point to. What came after needed nothing but an announcement and an audience willing not to ask.
A sane man in the fifteenth century, offered a tin of preserved excrement priced at the gold fix, or a signed urinal priced at whatever the room would bear, would have kept his money and walked out laughing. He was not a fool. He simply lived before the mechanism existed that could make him believe the laughter was his own failure of sophistication, rather than the correct response.
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Ninety cans sit in museum vaults and private collections around the world today, in Paris, London, Milan, Amsterdam. Not one has ever been opened. Their value has never required it.
What does it say about a value system when the only thing it cannot survive is being examined?
