Christie’s Augmented Intelligence sale, its first dedicated to art made using artificial intelligence (AI), has exceeded expectations.
The sale was the first-ever AI-dedicated auction at a major auction house. Per a press release, nearly half of the participants were millennials and Gen-Z.
The auction closed on 5 March. It attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, surpassing its initial estimate.
In all, 28 of the Augmented Intelligence sale’s 34 lots found buyers.
The auction included works by digital artists like Refik Anadol, Charles Csuri, Harold Cohen, Pindar Van Arman, Alexander Reben, and Claire Silver.
Nicole Sales Giles, VP and director of digital art sales at Christie’s, said: “At Christie’s, we are dedicated to championing the artists of our time.
“With this project, our goal was to spotlight the brilliant creative voices pushing the boundaries of technology and art.”
The highest price in the sale came for a work by Refik Anadol. ‘Machine Hallucinations – ISS Dreams – A’ sold for $277,200.
Works by Refik Anadol and more digital artists
This work uses a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites, reimagined through machine intelligence.
Another work, ‘Embedding Study 1 & 2’ by Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, sold for $94,500. This piece came from a text-to-image model trained on altered images of Herndon.
Through the AI art sale, the auction house hoped that collectors and the wider art world would recognise the “influence and significance” of the digital artists featured, said Sales Giles.
“The results of this sale confirmed that they did,” she said.
“Witnessing such overwhelming public support for this auction has been truly inspiring. I am honored to use Christie’s platform to ignite meaningful conversations about the future of creativity.”
The auction was controversial, with an open letter posted online on 8 February calling on Christie’s to cancel the sale.
The letter reads: “Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license.
“These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.”
Christie’s Augmented Intelligence sale
In response, a spokesperson for the auction house told the Art Newspaper: “The artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections.
“The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work.”
Last year, the first artwork painted by a humanoid robot sold at Sotheby’s for more than $1 million.
Images courtesy of Christie’s, lead image credit: Refik Anadol Studio
