When Piero Manzoni died of a heart attack in his Milan studio in February 1963 at age 29, fellow artist Ben Vautier signed the death certificate, declaring the death itself a work of art. This episode explains the philosophical universe that made that gesture logical, beginning with a self-taught aristocrat, born with a noble title in 1933, painting in the Milanese nuclear art movement during Italy’s postwar economic miracle.

We follow the 1957 Yves Klein exhibition of eleven identical blue canvases that convinced him painting had to be reduced to zero, and the Achromes that followed, made of kaolin clay, cotton wool, fiberglass, rabbit skin, and bread rolls, some treated with cobalt chloride so they would change over time. The conversation covers the Azimut gallery he founded with Enrico Castellani, the Artist’s Breath balloons, the 70 hard-boiled eggs stamped with his thumbprint, the 90 tin cans priced at the daily value of gold, the Magic Base that turned anyone standing on it into sculpture, and the upside-down Base of the World that made the entire planet his artwork.

• Why he saw Klein’s monochromes as the endpoint of painting as illusion
• How building decay into the Achromes attacked the idea of the eternal masterpiece
• Why a premium bought a balloon inflated by the artist himself
• Why opening one of the tin cans would destroy both the art and the investment
• How the cans later sold at auction for far more than their weight in gold