They kept the receipt.
Did you think paying $120,000 for a banana on a wall was extreme? Earlier this week, a receipt for an “invisible work of art” surpassed expectations after it sold for nearly $1.2 million at auction in Paris.
“This work is guaranteed and has received an irrevocable bid,” auction house Sotheby’s wrote in its catalog of the paycheck, which was spent for $1,151,467.40 – more than double the estimated price of $551,000.
Of course, paying money for nothing may seem strange. The receipt, however, was a rare holdover from Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, a mid-19th-century exhibition series in which pioneering French performance artist Yves Klein sold vacant spaces to collectors in exchange for bullion.
The radical visionary would then invite collectors to burn the receipts and throw half the gold into the Seine – the logic being that by doing so they would become the “ultimate owner” of the “Zone”.
A receipt authenticating the transfer of an invisible work by French artist Yves Klein entitled “Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Series N°1, Zone N°02” will be on display at Sotheby’s auction house in Paris on April 1st. Getty Images
A portrait by French artist Yves Klein.Getty Images
The aforementioned certificate of authenticity survived because collector Jacques Kugel refused to light it, the Guardian reported. It has since been exhibited everywhere from London to Paris before being bought by former gallerist Loïc Malle, who auctioned it alongside other pieces from his collection.
Designed to imitate a bank check, the 8-inch wide ticket is signed by Klein and dated December 7, 1959—several years before the artist’s death in 1962.
Experts have since credited the provocateur with anticipating modern NFT.
The receipt was dated December 7, 1959 – several years before the artist’s death in 1963. Getty Images
Klein has even been credited with foreseeing the rise of NFTs. Sotheby’s
“Some have likened the transmission of a zone of sensibility and the invention of receipts to an ancestor of NFT, which allows even the exchange of intangible works,” Sotheby’s wrote in the catalogue.
Whether the buyer, who is only identified as a “private European collector”, will purchase the receipt with cryptocurrency is not yet foreseeable.
In a similar meta-performance artwork in September, a Danish museum gave an artist $84,000 for a commissioned work — only for him to pocket the money and turn in two blank canvases titled “Take the Money and Run.”