“It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination,” Salvatore Garau stated about his sculpture.
An Italian artist recently auctioned an artwork worth nothing for €15,000 ($18,300) under the department of “They sold that for how much?!”
Last month, 67-year-old artist Salvatore Garau sold a “immaterial sculpture”—that is, one that does not exist.
To be fair, the artist may disagree on conceptual grounds. Garau’s work, named 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 stated to Diario AS, a Spanish newspaper. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”
Art-Rite, an Italian auction company, listed Lo Sono for sale in May. According to AS, the pre-sale estimate for the sculpture was between €6,000 and €9,000, but competing bids raised the price to €15,000.
The lucky bidder walked home with a certificate of authenticity and a set of instructions: the piece, according to Garau, must be displayed in a private house in a roughly five-by-five-foot space free of obstructions.
“When I decide to ‘exhibit’ an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms,” continued the artist.
If you thought it was just artsy nonsense, he goes on to make a fairly lofty parallel to the work: “After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?” He added.
The artist did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lo Sono is not the only work of this nature in Garau’s oeuvre. In February of this year, the artist showed BUDDHA IN CONTEMPLATION at Milan’s Piazza Della Scala, a similarly undetectable artwork marked by a square of tape on a cobblestoned walkway. Meanwhile, this week, he placed AFRODITE CRIES in front of the New York Stock Exchange. The Italian Cultural Institute funded the initiative, which is represented by an empty white circle.
“You don’t see it, but it exists; it’s made of air and spirit,” he said in a video about the Milan installation. “It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination, a power that anyone has, even those who don’t believe they have it.”
Indeed, many users on the internet appear to be having difficulty accessing that power. “So you really just taped a square and called that a sculpture?” reads the most liked comment.
