![]() ![]() The idea is everything, and “the execution is a perfunctory affair,” in the words of Sol LeWitt, one of conceptual art’s earliest theorists and practitioners.īut art had always been based on ideas. The claim was made that in Conceptual Art the idea behind a work now took precedence over questions of material, technical skill and aesthetics. Conceptual Art rejected the traditional art object, in the words of critic Roberta Smith, in favor of “a vast and unruly range of information, subjects and concerns not easily contained within a single object, but more appropriately conveyed by written proposals, photographs, documents, charts, maps, film and video, by the artists’ use of their own bodies, and, above all, by language itself.” His “work” has some connection to the tradition of Conceptual Art, a trend that emerged in the mid-1960s. The Italian artist (born in 1953) did not emerge out of thin air (although “thin air” seems to be very much his stock-in-trade). Garau is prospering while artists in the United States alone have lost an estimated average of $34,000 each, and hundreds of millions collectively, in creativity-based income since the beginning of the pandemic. “Debt, corporate bonds and other financial assets are what Marx characterised as fictitious capital.” Reflecting these economic and social processes, we now have arrived at highly speculated upon, fully “fictitious art.” As this may suggest, an enormous, unstable asset bubble in art and collectibles presently exists. This aesthetic charlatanry belongs on the same historical plane as the rise of financial parasitism generally and most recently, since the onset of the pandemic, the “vast escalation of speculation promoted by the Fed and other central banks,” in the words of a recent WSWS article. With I Am, Garau has provided nothing of value, taken the money and forced others to create the ostensible work themselves. Laughable as it is, this is the artist’s most pertinent remark about his “work.” Taking this nonsense at face value, Garau has entirely abdicated the artist’s responsibility to communicate something important about the world through his or her art. “It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination,” said Garau. It was allegedly displayed inside a taped square on the cobblestone. I Am is not Garau’s first invisible “sculpture.” In February, Garau exhibited Buddha in Contemplation in Milan’s Piazza della Scala. After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?” ![]() “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. ![]() “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”įor those confused by this double-talk, Garau appealed to mysticism. “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 said. How is one to conceive of an invisible sculpture? Garau had a ready pseudo-scientific explanation for Spanish tabloid Diario AS. Special lighting and climate control are optional. Garau stipulated that the work must be exhibited in a private home in an area of approximately five square feet that is free of obstruction. In exchange for this sum, the buyer-a private Milanese collector-of the putative work, the latest version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, received a certificate of authenticity and the artist’s instructions for displaying the sculpture. During the auction, bidders pushed the price up, and Garau walked away with €15,000 ($18,300). Even though the work has no material existence, the Art-Rite auction house estimated its value at between €6,000 and €9,000 (that is, between approximately $7,000 and $11,000). The invisible piece of art consists literally of nothing. In May, Italian artist Salvatore Garau sold his “immaterial sculpture” I Am at an auction. ![]()
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