h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I read a while back about an artist who exhibited 12 canisters of his own excrement in the serpentine gallery.

One critic commented 'It sounds like a load of crap'.

I know that the Conceptualist Piero Manzoni (I'm spelling from memory) did something like that. I wonder if he had any buyers?

I think that was andres Serrano. The thing about "can of artist's s**t" or whatever it was called, that is interesting to me is that once it is presented as an art object it ceases to be an ordinary can of poo. This concept can be seen to have come from the Readymades, the most famous being "Fountain" by Duchamp, which was a porcelain urinal signed with the name R. Mutt. Once the urinal was taken out of the context of its indended usefullness and put into the arena wherein things are viewed objectively (the gallery) it ceased to be a urinal and became an art-object.

I'm not a huge fan of ready-mades, but I accept the premise because provide justification for what I do as art. Do you believe that curatorial work/art education/display in itself is an art--although we do not create objects, we do affect how they are perceived? I have a hard time believing that museology/criticism is not an art--artists need museology just as much as curators need art! We create the art world through a dialogic which has as much to do with the art as with the presentation. Reactions????

My room is turning into an artistic demonstration of the second law of thermodynamics (the basis, as you will recall, for all the physics in the original hitchhikers guide)

Good point--out of context, a thing loses its use and becomes an art object. This is my major sticking point with modernist museums. See Heidegger on being present vs being ready to hand (am i right on my translations?)--the bit about the hammer.

I'm pretty sure it was Manzoni. The cans were covered in plain labels (no picture) with the words "Artists Shit" printed on them in several different languages. Cool huh!?