Using a hidden menu item for this will also mess up your pathway and menu highlighting, unfortunately.
It's a bit of a pain really.
Often you want to show content items without extra modules on the side (so that there is more space), but have side modules on the pages which list the items in a particular section or category.
A good way to achieve that on a news/magazine-type site, where it is not practical to publish a hidden menu link to each individual content item, is to publish a hidden Table - Content Section link for each section (which mostly takes precedence for ItemID purposes) and then remove from that single link (rather than hundreds of individual content item links) the modules you don't want to show when viewing your articles from that section.
It works very well if you are using Blog (rather than Table) listings for your real (ie. not hidden) menu items. You can assign modules to the blog menu links, but those modules won't show up when you click through to the article, because the link to the article in the blog listing will take its ItemID from the hidden Table - Content Section link.
But, as I say, it messes up your pathway and menu highlighting.
Unfortunately, because the ItemID is the single key used to determine what modules to display, what menu items to highlight and also what pathway to construct, things get messy when these requirements conflict.
It also means you can't assign modules to specific pages in a multi-page content item (because all the pages have the same ItemID). Though you can get round that one by including modules within the content item using the {mosloadposition} mambot.
You can only assign modules to ItemIDs, and ItemIDs have to be specifically created (ie. by making a menu link of some kind) in order to appear in the interface which allows you to do that - which is why occasionally, if there is a bug with something and an ItemID isn't appended to a link (or, for instance, you link directly to
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_search , without an ItemID) any modules not set to appear on ALL pages will disappear.
So the short answer to the question is: "No, not as far as I know; but there may be a kind of solution depending on your particular site setup and precisely what you are looking to achieve."
However, I would personally love to find a simple solution so that I can get rid of modules on content items without having to make separate links.
Of course, if you have a site-wide policy which says (for example)
never show right-hand column modules when displaying a full content item, you can always put PHP logic in your template file which removes the module positions on the right when option=com_content&task=view
