>>44829134To be fair, Manzoni really wasn't a big name before it, and the whole thing was meant to be a joke at the expense of the proto-contemporary art scene that was forming at the time, which was far too obsessed with "finding a piece of the artist within his creations".
So he just decided to sell pieces of himself and called it art (he had done another work called "Breath of the artist", which consisted of some regular balloons that he had filled); some people see it as a critique to Capitalism and mindless consumerism, but he likely only intended it to be some Dadaist-inspired joke at the expense of art critics and his fellow artists.
There's also good proof that the cans aren't actually filled with shit, but that's another story 