Update

The escalating value of the late Italian artist Piero Manzoni's canned feces was chronicled in News of the Weird in 1993, 1998, 2002 and 2004, but now in June 2007 his former colleague Agostino Bonalumi told a reporter that the project had been a hoax and that Manzoni had merely filled the cans with plaster. Manzoni created 90 small tins, and collectors had paid thousands of dollars each (making his feces worth more per ounce than gold, including once, in 1993, paying $75,000 for a tin). (A spokesman for Britain's Tate gallery, which once paid the equivalent of about $35,000 for one, said that the actual content of the art is beside the point.)