Receipt for ‘invisible art’ sells for $1.2m

Excerpts from a report in The Guardian:

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.

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.