An Italian Artist Sells Invisible Sculpture For $18,000 -- That's Right, It's Air

Meet Italian artist Salvatore Garau. He is the absolute genius who has figured out a way to finesse $18,000 out of an art collector who paid for an invisible sculpture. That's right, the art collector gets a proof of purchase, but there's absolutely no physical sculpture or even some digital work of art like those selling on the NFT marketplace.

I'm talking a big ol' poof of air. There's no sculpture, and yet someone paid $18,000 for the concept that Garau put out there for some moron to buy. This isn't some Onion story. NPR reported on the invisible sculpture purchase. Other outlets around the world are doing the same.

"An Italian artist, Salvatore Garau, recently sold his latest invisible sculpture, a work titled 'I Am.' It isn't. The art does not exist except in the imagination of the artist. Garau says the sculpture may be displayed in any light since it's not there. The buyer gets a stamped certificate in exchange for payment of $18,000, assuming they can't just imagine they paid," radio host Steve Inskeep said this week on NPR's "Morning Edition."

And you thought used car salesmen were full of s--t. Get a load of what Garau has going on here. He's saying this "air and spirit" sculpture is supposed to fit into a five-foot by five-foot square void of artificial light or air conditioning.






“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. Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us,” Garau explains.






Some of Salvatore's work that took skill:










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Joe Kinsey is the Senior Director of Content of OutKick and the editor of the Morning Screencaps column that examines a variety of stories taking place in real America. Kinsey is also the founder of OutKick’s Thursday Night Mowing League, America’s largest virtual mowing league. Kinsey graduated from University of Toledo.