An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. It’s Made Literally of Nothing

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2021-07-16 22:00:12

From the department of “They sold that for how much ?!” comes today’s story, about an Italian artist who, for the cool price of €15,000 ($18,300), recently auctioned an artwork that is… well, nothing.

Last month, the 67-year-old artist Salvatore Garau sold an “immaterial sculpture”—which is to say that it doesn’t exist.

To be fair, the artist might disagree on conceptual grounds. For Garau, the artwork, titled lo sono (which translates to “I am”), finds form in its own nothingness. “The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight,” he told the Spanish news outlet Diario AS . “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”

Lo Sono went up for sale in May at the Italian auction house Art-Rite. The pre-sale estimate valued the piece between €6,000-9,000, according to AS , but competing bidders pushed the price tag to €15,000.