The Baltimore Sun reported in June 1993 that New York City artist Todd Alden had recently asked 400 art collectors worldwide to send him samples of their feces so he could offer them for sale in personalized tins. Said Alden, "Scatology is emerging as an increasingly significant part of artistic inquiry in the 1990s." A 30-gram tin of the feces of Italian artist Piero Manzoni, canned in 1961, sold just before that for $75,000. Subsequent to this story, News of the Weird periodically tracked the fluctuating price of the several Manzoni tins, including Britain's Tate Gallery's 2002 purchase for $38,000 (which was over 100 times the price of an equal amount of gold). A colleague of Manzoni revealed in 2007 that his tins probably contained just plaster, but a Tate curator pointed out the irrelevance of the physical content of art. [Baltimore Evening Sun, 6-4-93; Sydney Morning Herald, 7-1-02; Reuters, 6-12-07]