Money for nothing: receipt for ‘invisible art’ sells for $1.2m
How much would you pay for nothing?
For one private European art collector, it is $1.2m. That’s the amount paid at a recent Sotheby’s auction in Paris for a receipt written by the French artist Yves Klein to prove the ownership of one of his “invisible art” pieces – now being billed by collectors as a precursor to NFTs.
Klein, a key figure in the French new realism movement founded in the 1960s, was a pioneer in performance art. In 1958, he launched The Void, an exhibition in which he placed a cabinet in an empty room. It was a success, with thousands of visitors showing up to the mostly vacant Parisian gallery.
Soon after, Klein decided to offer collectors the opportunity to buy invisible “zones” in exchange for gold bullion. Each purchase of one of Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility came with a receipt, which he urged buyers to burn.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the burning was part of a ritual in which Klein wanted collectors to assert themselves as “definitive owners” of their “zones”. Klein would then dump half the gold payment into the Seine River and burn the receipts among witnesses.
One of the collectors, Jacques Kugel, refused to burn his receipt. It has become a valued piece of art in its own right, displayed at various cultural institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Hayward Gallery in London.
Loïc Malle, a former gallery owner, eventually bought the receipt and auctioned it off along with other items from his private collection.
The receipt measures less than 8in wide and is designed to mimic a bank check. It features Klein’s signature on the bottom right and is dated 7 December 1959.
“Some have likened the transfer of a zone of sensitivity and the invention of receipts as an
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