Some Very Expensive Air

The painting above was created by Italian artist Salvatore Garau in 2003. Titled “Tramonto in rosso” — Sunrise in red — it can be yours, if you have a few thousand dollars lying around According to Artnet, it will hit the auction blog again in about a week. It’s expected to fetch between €2,500 and €3,500, or about $2,700 to $3,800. That’s pretty good, but he’s done better. For example, in May 2021, he sold a sculpture titled “Io sono” — “I am” — for roughly six times that, fetching €12,000 ($18,000).

Here’s a picture of the sculpture via Art Rite, the auction house that listed the piece.

If the image appears to take a while to load, there’s no need to check your internet connection or anything like that. Despite being called “I am,” the sculpture doesn’t exist, at least not in any tangible sense. It is only real in the viewer’s imagination.

Garau called his work an “immaterial sculpture” according to Artnet, explaining that “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.” That doesn’t mean a lot to most people — myself included — but to at least a few fan of Garau and his work, it meant enough to fork over enough for thousands of dollars. (The work was only expected to fetch around $7,500 at auction, but multiple bidders were interested, pushing the price up.)

Despite the fact that “lo sono” doesn’t exist in real space, Garau still had instructions for how the winning bidder should properly show it off. Per the Independent, the ethereal work “must be displayed in a private room away from any obstruction. It also needs to be kept in an area that is about 5 ft long and 5 ft wide. Lighting and environment control are optional due to the fact that no one can see the work.”

But the buyer didn’t got home totally empty-handed. They received a certificate of authenticity, seen here (via Snopes), “in exchange for payment of $18,000, assuming they can’t just imagine they paid,” per NPR.

Bonus fact: In 2001, authors Thomas and Cindy Senior published a book titled “The Joys Of Getting Older.” The 120-page paperback is an easy read — all the pages are blank. The book, unlike Garau’s creation, is a joke.

From the Archives: Air Plane: If you collect superhero toys, you can buy yourself a Batmobile — those are easy to find. But can you buy a toy version of Wonder Woman’s invisible jet? Kind of.