Christie’s to host groundbreaking auction featuring only AI art

Kicking off on 20 February and running until 5 March, the ‘Augmented Intelligence’ sale at Christie’s in New York will showcase more than 20 works from AI pioneers like Refik Anadol, Pinar Van Arman, and Claire Silver, spanning everything from early neural network experiments to contemporary creations.

This marks the first time a major auction house has hosted an exclusive AI art auction. The collection will include a diverse mix of pieces – some of which are NFTs, while others are physical works such as sculptures, paintings, and prints.

Perhaps the most intriguing lot will be ‘Emerging Faces’ (2017) by Pinar Van Arman, a series of abstract portraits painted by two AI agents. The AI algorithms work together, one generating human faces while the other halts the process once a face is detected. The evocative – even haunting – results are considered among the first to be painted autonomously by neural networks.

Another unique feature of the sale is the inclusion of an interactive robot painting. The 3.7-metre-tall (12 feet) robot, created by Alexander Reben, will be on hand at the Rockefeller Center gallery, where it will paint a new section of the canvas in real time as online bids increase. Starting at just $100, bidders can watch the art take shape as the auction progresses.

Alongside these works, husband-and-wife duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst will present their Embedding Study’ (2024) pieces, which were part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial. These works, which feature a character in a bulky spacesuit, are based on Herndon’s appearance and made using a text-to-image AI model.

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Though the majority of the pieces are expected to fetch significant sums, there has been some controversy surrounding the auction. Reid Southern, an illustrator, published an open letter calling on artists not to auction works that may have been created using AI models trained on copyrighted works without permission.

“Many of the works you are planning to put up for auction use AI models trained on copyrighted works,” reads the letter, “AI models and the companies behind them exploit human artists and use their works without permission or compensation to build commercial AI products that compete with artists.”

As of Monday 10 February, the letter had been signed by over 3,400 people, with many citing concerns about the ethics behind using AI in art creation.

For its part, Christie’s wrote on X that the sale “challenges us to rethink the limits of artistic agency”. The auction house is optimistic and is expecting the auction to bring in at least $600,000 (€581,000), with cryptocurrency being accepted as payment for most of the lots.

Christie’s has already made its mark in the digital art world, not least with a landmark non-fungible token (NFT) auction in 2021. On 11 March 2021, the auction house made history by selling Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ for a staggering $69 million €66.8 million) – the first major auction house to bring NFTs to the global stage.

In November, Sotheby’s New York made waves by selling a painting created by Ai-Da, a humanoid robot powered by AI, for $1,084,800 (€1 million).