Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Love of beauty is taste. Creation of beauty is art.” While I love Emerson dearly, if we think of “beauty” as something that looks beautiful, I would have to disagree — art isn’t necessarily “pretty.”

How, then, would we classify contemporary artist Piero Manzoni and his 1961 art piece, “Merda d’Artista”? The piece itself consists of 90 cans of Manzoni’s own feces, canned and tacked with labels reading “100% Pure Artist’s Shit” written in several languages, along with the statement that the feces are “Freshly Preserved.” The cans themselves are a dull aluminum color, and the labels are an unsightly mustard-gray — not something one would use to decorate the dining room table.

The idea of aesthetics is brought into question here, or what people think of as having artistic worth and what people would consider attractive; not only in the sense of what is visually pleasing, but in how a person reacts emotionally to a piece of art. Historically we've been taught that what's attractive is solely dependent on looks, but if “Merda d’Artista” were worth as much as its looks and content, the artwork wouldn’t fetch more than ₤97,000 ($154,000). And this tally is based on the auction of just one can of Manzoni’s shit — there are 89 others he created along with it, which creates a net worth of over $13 million for the entire collection.

Why were people willing to pay so much for the feces? While the cans might not have been classically beautiful, they were valued because Manzoni’s art piece did what no other art piece had previously done: It questioned the worth and merit of the artist and questioned the idea of commerce and economics through canned excrement. By selling the piece off as "art," Manzoni questioned the value of art and beauty, challenging the age-old idea that beauty is art and art is beauty. Manzoni saw that there was another element to art itself — art wasn’t just made to be tacked up on somebody’s wall, it was meant to communicate something. It was beautiful in concept while its physicality might have been a bit revolting.

Our changing idea of beauty is related to our changing culture: Beauty is a living word with a living definition. Old ideas of beauty were limited to European Renaissance aesthetics, where statues of comely men were chiseled out of marble and God reached out to man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But as we move forward in time, our concept of beauty branches out from a limited definition to a broader one — one that encapsulates more than the narrow interest of “prettiness” and is driven by expressing areas of our lives and global issues that are now everyday concepts to us, including capitalism, colonialism, globalization, sexism, racism and homosexuality, to name a few.

Art is no longer just a decoration, but functions as a statement that reveals the cultural and social understanding of the artist. The issues discussed within contemporary art have been expanding as well, as the artists’ demographic itself has been changing. Now, more and more, artists are of non-European descent, or identify culturally with minority nations or groups, lending a voice to individuals who haven't historically been heard.

For instance, we can take Cindy Sherman, a female artist, whose staged self-portraits dissect the idea of identity through the way she dresses herself up under the guises of drastically different female personas, all of whom look startlingly dissimilar. Sherman’s artwork raises the idea of female identity and women’s roles within society.

We can also look into London artist Yinka Shonibare, who is of Nigerian descent and whose artwork reflects the concepts of biculturalism and self-perception versus cultural perception of race and culture. Shonibare’s artwork seeks to create a sort of cultural and racial confusion. His 1998 work “Diary of a Victorian Dandy” depicts Shonibare as a powder-wigged dandy overseeing a white Victorian court.