A receipt for literally nothing just sold at auction for well over a million bucks.
As the saying goes, “there’s a sucker born every minute,” and that was apparently apt in the time of a French artist called Yves Klein.
Long before people plunked down real money for the virtual ownership of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, people plunked down actual gold bullion for a paper receipt for what Klein coined in 1959 a “zone of empty space” — which is, as it sounds, nothing.
The experiment in experimental art had a person trading gold for one of the receipts, which they were instructed to burn, leaving no trace the transaction existed.
While that may seem like handing Klein money but with extra steps, the artist, who died in 1962, vowed to dump the gold he’d acquired in the River Seine. Artnet reports, “The act, according to the artist, ‘rebalanced the natural order’ between buyer and seller.”
However, a Frenchman named Jacques Kugel apparently held onto one of the receipts instead of burning it — thought to be one of the only buyers to do so.
That yellowed, framed, receipt ended up in the collection of a French gallery owner, and it just sold at Sotheby’s to a private European collector for $1.2 million.
Money, for nothing.