Conceptual Art

The Most Expensive Conceptual Artworks Ever Sold

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By Lydia Voss-Hammond

Conceptual art has always asked big questions: What is art? Who decides? Can you invoice someone for an idea? As it turns out, yes — and often for millions.

Below are the most outrageously expensive conceptual artworks ever sold, proof that in today’s art market, a compelling concept can be worth more than gold.

1. Untitled (The Artist Is Not Present) — £6.3 million

Artist: Lucca Vonn

Sold: 2023, Basel

Lucca Vonn’s minimalist masterstroke involved renting an empty gallery space, placing a single folding chair in the middle, and… not showing up. For three months. The gallery posted daily updates confirming the artist’s continued absence.

The buyer received:

• A legal certificate of absence

• A guestbook signed by confused viewers

• The folding chair (optional, extra £20,000 for insurance)

Collectors called it “a haunting exploration of ego and expectation.” Critics called it “an invoice with lighting.” The market called it: SOLD.

2. NFTitled #1 (Now Fungible Tomorrow)

Artist: Gl!tch.eth

Sold: 2021

An NFT that was self-aware enough to predict its own irrelevance. This looping 12-second video featured a slowly pixelating Ethereum logo, overlaid with the text:

“This will be worthless by the time you brag about buying it.”

Despite its cynicism — or perhaps because of it — it sparked a bidding war among crypto collectors. Its value later crashed to 40p and then mysteriously rebounded to £47 million after Gl!tch.eth tweeted: “I’m deleting my wallet.”

Still considered the only NFT to successfully roast its own buyer.

3. Untitled (You Thought It Was Included) — £4.9 million

Artist: Delia Flux

Sold: 2020

This piece made headlines when a collector paid nearly £5 million for what they believed was a monumental glass sculpture — only to discover the sculpture was not included in the sale. What was included? A printed receipt stating:

“Ownership is the illusion. Thank you for participating.”

Flux later clarified in an artist’s note: “The sculpture exists emotionally, not legally.” The collector reportedly wept for 40 minutes, then put on a brave face, called it “the most powerful thing I’ve ever bought,” and tried to sell it immediately on the secondary market.

4. Silence, Auctioneer — £4.3 million

Artist: Milton Perchton

Sold: 2024

The concept: a work sold during a real auction, in total silence. No bidding, no names, no numbers — just a quiet nod from a buyer and a muted tap from a gavel made of felt. The piece was described as “a rebellion against spectacle” and “a slow clap in art form.”

Nothing physical changed hands. The buyer received a notarized video of the silent auction and a small wooden block labeled “Proof of Presence.”

Rumor has it another bidder tried to “out-silence” the buyer with a stronger nod but was disqualified for blinking.

5. Enormous Pile of Money #6

Artist: Hedge Fund

Sold: 2025, Pimlico Wilde

We couldn’t leave this one out. The artist Hedge Fund — conceptual art’s shadowy high priest of profit — sold a digital, data-driven rendering of a pile of money that inflates and deflates in real time with global markets. Collectors own fractional shares; the pile grows if capitalism thrives, shrinks if it falters.

Described by one critic as “Warhol with a calculator,” and by a hedge fund manager as “relatable.”

Included in the purchase:

• A VR headset

• A market-linked music score for the harpsichord.

• And the distinct feeling you’ve been both mocked and immortalized

Honourable Mention: Empty Frame With Price Tag Still Attached — £1.2 million

Artist: Unknown

Sold: Also unknown

Was it a prank? A mistake? A masterwork of minimalist irony? We may never know. But someone bought it — and the market applauded.

Conclusion

Conceptual art isn’t about what you see — it’s about what you paid to believe you saw. And if that belief costs millions, well, that’s just part of the concept.

Pimlico Wilde Welcomes Conceptual Artist My Friend Leslie

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In a bold move that underscores its commitment to emerging conceptual voices, Pimlico Wilde gallery has announced the representation of the artist known simply as My Friend Leslie. The appointment signals not merely an addition to the gallery’s roster, but a deliberate expansion of its philosophical and aesthetic parameters. Leslie’s work—elusive yet sharply intelligent—inhabits a liminal space between sociological critique and poetic ephemerality, unsettling the viewer’s relationship to medium, language, and narrative.

My Friend Leslie, whose adopted moniker serves as both mask and provocation, has cultivated a practice that resists formal classification. Oscillating between installation, performance, ephemeral textworks, and détourned archival materials, her oeuvre is fundamentally concerned with the mechanisms of memory, authorship, and the social architectures that underpin emotional life. She is, in the most rigorous sense, a conceptualist: uninterested in objects per se, yet deeply invested in the cultural and psychic residues they leave behind.

Her 2023 piece Do Not Archive This Moment—a time-based installation involving shredded family photographs, bureaucratic signage, and live recitations of deliberately misremembered diary entries—garnered critical attention for its deft interweaving of personal trauma with state machinery. The work eschews sentimentality while exposing the undercurrents of surveillance and erasure within domestic narrative. It is emblematic of Leslie’s deftness with affect: her capacity to evoke discomfort without melodrama, intimacy without confession.

Though her visual language is sparse—often drawing on the aesthetics of instructional design, corporate minimalism, and mid-century psychoanalytic texts—Leslie’s work vibrates with a dense polyphony of allusion. She cites influences as diverse as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sophie Calle, and the Situationists, yet her approach feels distinctly her own: playful, unsettling, intellectually rigorous.

It is perhaps in her linguistic interventions that Leslie is most radical. In a recent series titled Pronouns for Future Use, she constructs sculptural texts from found legal documents, then alters their grammar to propose alternate subjectivities. The resulting pieces—a series of lacquered aluminum placards and performative readings—navigate the border between semantic disruption and identity politics. They ask not only what is said, but who may say it, and when.

Pimlico Wilde’s Director of Semantics, Amaya Rens, described the gallery’s decision as “a necessary alignment with a voice we believe will be foundational in the next phase of conceptual practice.” She continued: “Leslie’s work is not about novelty; it is about re-inscribing meaning into the banal, the disavowed, and the illegible. She has a gift for revealing the unseen logic beneath everyday systems.”

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition of Leslie’s work, This Was Never Yours to Name, opens this autumn. While details remain tightly guarded, hints suggest an immersive textual environment drawing on defunct legal codes, anonymous chat transcripts, and a rare 17th-century printer’s manual. True to form, Leslie will offer no opening remarks and will not be present at the opening.

This deliberate evasiveness is not, as some critics have lazily proposed, a gesture of obscurantism. Rather, it reflects a belief in the autonomy of ideas, their capacity to circulate beyond biography or brand. In a cultural moment increasingly tethered to visibility and personal disclosure, My Friend Leslie’s refusal to comply may be her most urgent gesture yet.

With her addition to Pimlico Wilde, the gallery becomes not only a platform but a participant in Leslie’s project—one that is likely to continue challenging the comfort zones of curators, collectors, and audiences alike. As contemporary art grapples with its own complicit structures, artists like Leslie are not merely welcome; they are indispensable.

Reflections on the famous New York exhibition of My Friend Leslie

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In the spring of 2019, My Friend Leslie staged a widely discussed and critically divisive solo exhibition at the Fenwick Museum of Art entitled Apparitions in the Civic Realm. Heralded by some as “a palimpsest of the post-liberal imaginary” and dismissed by others as “deliberately inaccessible,” the exhibition marked the artist’s most ambitious and conceptually rigorous foray into institutional space to date.

Comprising three floors of minimal yet emotionally charged interventions, Apparitions resisted the conventional logic of spatial coherence or narrative progression. Visitors entered through a narrow vestibule coated in matte legal blue—a hue My Friend Leslie later identified as “borrowed from obsolete zoning maps of Queens.” Within this space, wall-mounted QR codes led to intentionally dead or redirected links, a gesture that many interpreted as a meditation on epistemic instability and the disorientation of digital archival systems. This introductory environment established a central concern of the exhibition: the erosion of legibility under late bureaucratic capitalism.

Perhaps the most discussed component of the show was the tripartite installation Public Secrets (2018), which occupied the museum’s fifth floor. Here, My Friend Leslie juxtaposed deaccessioned urban planning models from the 1960s with a series of hand-transcribed psychiatric intake forms sourced—according to the museum’s label—from a now-defunct therapeutic community in upstate New York. The forms, scrawled in delicate graphite on vellum, were layered over repurposed municipal signage reading “No Loitering,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” and the ambiguous “Subject to Inspection.” The cumulative effect was one of ethical vertigo: viewers found themselves implicated in a system of quiet surveillance even as they were invited to empathize with its casualties.

As critic LaDonna Merriweather noted in July, My Friend Leslie’s practice here enacted “a form of conceptual counter-archives, wherein personal testimony is not revealed but displaced, its legibility contingent on the viewer’s own complicity.”¹

Equally striking was the series of time-based performances that occurred without formal scheduling or announcement. Entitled Unscheduled Lives, these involved uniformed performers—hired through a temp agency—wandering the museum reciting fragments of local administrative code in affectless tones. Their presence, indistinguishable at times from security staff, troubled the boundaries between art, labour, and institutional authority. The performances’ refusal to “stage” themselves was emblematic of My Friend Leslie’s larger refusal to provide resolution or spectacle.

A subtler, yet no less incisive work was Indexical Drift (2017–18), a set of 24 microfilm viewers arranged in a grid across a dimly lit gallery. Inside each, viewers could peruse fragments of letters, obituaries, and inventory manifests—all anonymized and redacted beyond decipherability. The flickering of the film loops created a durational hum, suggestive of bureaucratic fatigue and archival entropy. It is a testament to My Friend Leslie’s conceptual precision that these pieces conveyed so much through so little: a kind of anti-monumentality charged with quiet defiance.

Reception of the exhibition was sharply polarized. The New Liverpool Times praised My Friend Leslie’s “brutal subtlety” and her capacity to “aestheticize absence without romanticising it,”² while others accused the work of “aestheticized opacity verging on institutional satire.”³ Yet even detractors conceded the show’s intellectual rigor and undeniable affective power.

My Friend Leslie, in keeping with her practice, made no public comment on the exhibition and refused all interviews. In place of a press release, the gallery issued a statement reading simply: “The artist has nothing to add.”

What remains of Apparitions in the Civic Realm is not a set of objects, but a set of conditions: a destabilized visitor, a murky authority, a network of disavowed speech acts. Like much of My Friend Leslie’s work, the exhibition will resist traditional forms of remembrance, and perhaps that is its most enduring gesture.

¹ LaDonna Merriweather, “Outtakes from the Civic Archive,” October, no. 189 (Fall 2024): 66.

² Holland Cotter, “The Absences Speak Louder Than Words,” The New York Times, April 14, 2024.

³ Alex Greenberger, “What’s She Hiding? Conceptual Obfuscation at the Whitney,” Artforum, May 2024.

The Last Frame is Yours

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Medium: 127-hour single-channel video, involuntary audience participation, signed NDAs, mandatory reflective silence.

Screening Format: 16K digital projection, no subtitles.

Runtime: 5 days, 7 hours, 12 minutes. No intermissions.

The Last Frame is Yours is not a film. It is a commitment, a test, a sentence. At 127 hours in length, the piece obliterates the notion of passive spectatorship, demanding total submission from its audience. Gallery-goers must sign a waiver before entering, acknowledging their understanding that no one is permitted to leave until the final frame has been seen.

The film’s structure is elusive: a meandering collage of unedited security footage, flickering landscapes filmed at one frame per hour, actors reading novels in languages they don’t understand with deliberate hesitation, and entire stretches of black screen where the only soundtrack is the lo-res recording of a someone filling a car with petrol. At irregular intervals, a clock appears, but it does not tell the time.

Viewers are provided with a single, numbered blanket and a deliberately uncomfortable chair. Meals are served in near silence, consisting of a thin broth and dry crackers, a menu devised in collaboration with sleep deprivation researchers. At night (though time loses meaning quickly), pre-recorded voices murmur speculative reflections on the nature of endings, though it is never clear who is speaking.

Davos insists the audience must earn the final frame. Only those who endure the full experience are granted the right to see it. What happens in the last moment remains unknown—viewers sign an NDA and are forbidden from discussing it outside the screening.

Artist Statement:

“This work is a short film that I have worked on whilst researching my magnum opus, a 300 hour feature filmed on Hampstead Heath called Fred Astaire goes to Space.”

— Davos

Curator’s Notes:

This work is the culmination of a career-long investigation into the intersection of time, endurance, and the collapse of voluntary engagement. With The Last Frame is Yours, he transcends conventional filmic expectations, creating a piece that is at once cinematic, sculptural, and carceral.

Drawing from the durational legacies of Warhol’s Empire and Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, but stripping away the safety of optional departure, Davos forces the viewer into a state of radical submission. The fluctuating pace—sometimes glacial, sometimes violently abrupt—mirrors the psychological erosion of captivity, though unlike most imprisonment, this is one the audience has chosen.

The final frame, withheld until total surrender, serves as both punishment and reward. Those who reach it emerge transformed, though no one can say exactly how.

Visitor Guidelines:

• Once admitted, attendees may not leave until the screening is complete.

• Bathroom breaks are allowed, but must be taken in silent, single-file procession, monitored by a gallery attendant.

• No external timekeeping devices are permitted. Phones must be left outside.

• At the end of the screening, attendees are required to sit in silent reflection for one hour before departure.

Price: £1,750,000 (includes blanket, numbered certificate of completion, and exclusive access to a single still from the final frame).

Limited Edition Prints: A series of five images from indeterminate points in the film, titled You Were Here, But When?, is available for £250,000 each.

Critics’ Reactions:

• Sally Quant: “A relentless, unforgiving masterpiece.”

• Michel Downton: “Davos has done what no filmmaker has dared: he has made time itself the antagonist.”

• The Torquay Guardian: “I lasted 84 hours before I broke and was carried to A and E on a passing window-cleaner’s ladder. I can never know what I missed. This will haunt me forever.”

The Last Frame is Yours is not a film you watch. It is a film you survive.