London - A small tin of excrement, one of eight works by Piero Manzoni, an Italian conceptual artist who died in 1963, was sold for £17,250 at Sotheby's in London last night.
Manzoni took the idea of life as art to extremes. He produced a series of 90 tins of merda d'artista (artist's faeces), labelled in English, French, German and Italian. Each of the tins was signed, numbered and priced according to the daily market rate for gold.