Salvatore Garau didn’t even need a block of marble.
The Italian artist presented “Io Sono” (I Am), a sculpture that, according to him, occupies a space measuring 150 by 150 centimeters in a square in Milan. The detail is that there is nothing there: neither a figure, nor a base, nor a thread. Even so, a buyer paid nearly 18.000 dollars to acquire it, certificate of authenticity included.
The problem came afterward. French artist Boyer Tresaco came forward to say that he had already been working with invisible sculptures years before Garau, and publicly accused him of plagiarism. The question left hanging on social media was inevitable: how do you copy something that cannot be seen, touched, or measured? Garau never responded in the same tone as the controversy, and his invisible work technically remains in the same place where he left it.