15 Works of Art That Were Just One Big Troll

Italian artist Piero Manzoni claimed to have filled 90 cans with his shit, the concept being that art buyers wanted something truly intimate from artists, and what more personal than dumps? They may actually be full of plaster, nobody knows.

Marcel Duchamp made art history in 1917, signing a urinal (as “R. Mutt”) and presenting it to the Society of Independent Artists. The concept of “readymades,” proclaiming preexisting objects to be art, was key to the avant-garde and Dada movements. 

In 2021, British artist Gavin Turk canned his own piss and sold that for its weight in silver in tribute to Manzoni. One of Turk’s first works was a plaque commemorating his own success, self-created notoriety which seemed to work.

Yves Klein was famous for his ever-so-blue monochrome works. In 1958 he debuted his reputation-changing ​​La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l'état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide — an empty room that thousands of people lined up to see.

Damien Hirst is king of having his cake and eating it — challenging the art world’s fixation on spectacle and shock value by selling a shark suspended in formaldehyde for a huge amount of money.

John Baldessari’s early work involved trolly messages painted on canvas poking fun at the “rules” of art. Then, in 1968, he decided to reinvent this work by burning it, turning the ashes into cookies and presenting the cookies as art. 

Man Ray, the pioneering surrealist and visual artist, produced some absolutely incredible work and some stuff that he absolutely knew was a piss-take. Enigma of Isidore Ducasse was a sewing machine wrapped up in a blanket.

Anonymous street artist Banksy sold a print of his Balloon Girl image for a staggering $1.4 million in 2018, at which point a shredder hidden in the frame was triggered, slicing the artwork up before a horrified Sotheby’s audience.

Richard Prince’s 2014 exhibition New Portraits consisted of screengrabs of other people’s work — on Instagram — printed out and displayed in a gallery. Clever trolling of what art can and can’t be? Shameless theft? Or both, but mainly the latter? 

Artist Brad Troemel blurs the lines between fine art, memes and full-on shitposting. His website The Jogging featured nonexistent Photoshopped sculptures presented as galleried works — partially in attack toward the gatekeeping nature of the traditional art world.

Artist David Hammons said, “I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never ever liked art, ever.” His self-titled 2019 installation — filthy sheets, dirty tents, a half-formed theme — was described by Frieze as “a trap: a parody of pious, politically activist art.” 

Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein’s film shows Ulay — later to become enormously famous for his collaborations with partner Marina Abramovic — stealing Carl Spitzweg’s Der arme Poet (1839) from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie and and installing it in a local Turkish family’s living room.

When Maurizio Cattelan had two weeks to put work together for a show in Amsterdam, he took the unusual approach of stealing an entire Paul de Revs show from another gallery, in boxes, and claiming it as his own work.

In 2018, art historian Mira Feticu received a tip about Picasso’s Tête d’Arlequin, stolen six years earlier. She followed clues to Hungary and tearfully dug it up, only for performance art duo BERLIN to reveal they’d faked it. Dicks!

Distressed by how commercial the art world had become, complicated electronica/art duo the KLF presented one million pounds in £50 notes nailed to a wall, to be sold for… half a million pounds. Baffling, balls-out and financially irresponsible.