15.000 euro for the invisible sculpture of Garau
At first glance, the name doesn’t say much, at least not to the uninitiated. - Salvatore Garau, who is he? - I have asked this question myself more and more often in these days by many reasonable people, rightly astonished. Is it possible? Can a work of art that cannot be seen sell for 15,000 euros? It seems like a hoax, fake news; at best, a clever marketing operation. In any case, it’s all true. It really happened.
Garau auctioned off his invisible sculpture I am at Art-Rite in Milan. Estimated price: 6/9,000 euros, adjudication 12,000, 15,000 with rights.
Crazy stuff, if we think what the unwary or cunning buyer bought - only time will tell: in the meantime, as for the artifact, there is nothing, air, emptiness. On the other hand, the check gave him the right to receive an authentication (obviously) and a sheet of instructions in the style of Cattelan after the sale of the famous banana. Thus we learn that the masterpiece must be treated with care. It can only be exhibited in a private area that, for goodness sake, is free from any obstacle and is inserted in a surface strictly of 150x150cm. During normal times, collectors would invite their friends home to show with understandable pride their Picasso, Fontana, and de Chirico.
Let’s imagine the face of those who will be exhorted by the anonymous spender to admire in an invisible square filled with nothing the sculpture that doesn’t exist. Someone, perhaps, will say that it would be a good idea to have the collector undergo a psychiatric visit, someone else, with more practical sense, could go so far as to advise his relatives to freeze his bank account. And the ingenious Garau - it takes genius, let’s admit it, to succeed in such an undertaking - what does he do, what does he say? He rubs his hands, let’s suppose, having suddenly become famous around half the world and having triggered the war on social media between admirers and detractors.
All notoriety, all grace received. He is now releasing willingly interviews with a tone of a maître à penser. He quotes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, even nothing has a weight. He tries to convince us that his “void is nothing but a space full of energy” and so on he keeps philosophizing. He distances himself from cryptoart: his work “is unique, unrepeatable and does not pollute like nfts”. And who dares to remind him, for example, of Manzoni’s Fiato d’artista, or De Dominicis’s Cubo invisibile, he cuts short with the sentence we are all Duchamp’s children. Poor Daddy Marcel, one cannot say that he has always been lucky with his offspring.
