Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what happens when it’s undetected by the eye?
An Italian artist sold an invisible sculpture for over $18,000 and had to give the buyer a certificate of authenticity to prove it’s real, the Daily Mail reported.
Salvatore Garau sold his piece, entitled “Io Sono” (I am), to an unidentified buyer last month.
Italian auction house Art-Rite organized the sale of the “immaterial” statue in May with a beginning estimated value coming in between $7,000 and $11,000.
“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,” the Sardinian-born artist explained, according to Hypebeast. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”
The 67-year-old explained in a video that “you don’t see it but it exists; it is made of air and spirit.”
“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,” he continued.
The “air and spirit” sculpture is intended to be contained in a 5-by-5-foot square and is intended to be displayed in a private space without artificial lighting and climate control.
Garau defended his invisible art with a grandiose comparison: “After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?”
This isn’t the first piece of Garau’s that is unrecognizable to the human eye. In February, the artist exhibited “Buddha In Contemplation,” another invisible sculpture at the Piazza della Scala in Milan. And just this week, Garau installed his most recent statue, “Afrodite Piange,” facing the New York Stock Exchange.
The invisible work comes amidst a rise in popularity of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that are one-of-a-kind, verifiable digital assets traded on blockchain technology. In March, the first NFT sold by Christie’s by the artist Beeple went for $69.3 million and Sotheby’s is set to auction off the world’s first known NFT this week.