You Can Become an Artwork at This New York Museum—Thanks to Piero Manzoni

Sometimes making art can be straightforward, nothing more than a person standing on a box for a minute, striking a pose, and having their photograph taken. These are the instructions for Piero Manzoni’s Magical Base (1961), his playful conceptual machine that turns living, breathing bodies into works of art. By quite literally placing the everyman on a pedestal, it flipped the ready-made on its head, blurred the boundary between artist and audience and anticipated the Actionist art of the coming decade.

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