Someone who thinks it’s silly to pay money for invisible statues could still see something worthwhile in Garau’s art because it makes people think, or even because it makes them laugh. Art, the ultimate cultural currency, is clearly well-suited to this type of thinking. More work is now being done that broadens out economic theories of value from just prices, with economists discussing things like environmental or wellbeing benefits. However, another key criticism of economics has been its tendency to see value largely through a financial lens. A town in Japan believes so much in the economy-boosting power of art that they spent the Covid-19 relief grant their government gave them on a giant squid statue. MONA, home of the poo-machine, has been credited with creating a tourist boom in Tasmania, Australia’s poorest state. On the flip side, art can be a big financial boon for a local community if it draws tourists (and their purses) to the area. But how many people would agree with that judgement? In pure price terms, an invisible statue is more valuable than a year's worth of groceries ( £1,670) or a year's worth of care work ( £17,199). One common criticism of these economic ideas of value is that they don't place enough weight on concepts like fairness and inequality. Two of the most common are (1) that value is determined by the balance between how many people want a thing (demand) and how many of that thing there is (supply), and (2) that value is determined by how much utility - that’s pleasure or usefulness - a thing gives someone. Part of the difficulty is that humans have a bunch of different qualities they link to value, including quality, rarity, necessity and sentimentality.Įconomists have spent a lot of time over the years trying to pin down the concept of value, and have come up with a bunch of different ideas and theories. Although, to be fair to art, this is also true of pretty much everything in our economies. This subjectivity means the question of how valuable a piece of art is can be a hard thing for people to agree on. For every person who finds Garau’s work a spectacular commentary on imagination and spiritualism there will be a person who thinks the sculptor is the best con man since Bernie Madoff. The MONA museum in Australia bought a piece of art that literally creates poo.Īrt is incredibly subjective. The street artist Bansky sold a £1 million piece of art that self-shredded. Weird, but perhaps not so weird for the modern artworld, which often sees strange things move for huge sums. The art piece comes with an authentication certificate, instructions for how to ‘display’ it… and nothing else. But that’s exactly what happened when the artist Salvatore Garau put his ‘invisible' sculpture up for sale. Someone paying any money, let alone thousands of dollars, for something that doesn’t actually exist sounds pretty barmy. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.Someone just bought an invisible sculpture for $18,300. “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 explained. Garau spoke to Spanish outlet Diario AS about the piece, saying he likes to think of the sculpture as a “vacuum.” But the hype surrounding the item pushed the final selling price to US$18,300. 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. Salvatore Garau sold his piece, entitled “Io Sono” (I am), to an unidentified buyer last month. Though that price is relatively low in the art world, it’s pretty significant when you consider the work is an “immaterial sculpture,” meaning someone dropped thousands of dollars on an invisible piece that is literally made of nothing. An Italian artist has left everyone scratching their heads after selling an invisible sculpture for over $18,000 (Rs 13.36 lakh) and even gave the buyer a certificate of authenticity to prove it’s real.
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