Artificial intelligence and art have been controversial for years. So it’s no surprise that Christie’s faced protests over its first-ever AI-dedicated auction, which the auction house says was the first ever from any major auction house, faced protests. In February, more than 5,600 artists signed an open letter asking Christie’s to cancel the sale.
“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,” the open letter reads in part. “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. Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.”
A representative for Christie’s shared a statement about the issue.
“From the beginning, two things have been true about the art world: one, artists are inspired by what came before them, and two, art can spark debate, discussion, and controversy,” the statement reads. “The discussions around digital art, including art created using AI technology, are not new and in many ways should be expected. Many artists — Pop artists, for example — have been the subject of similar discussions. Having said that, Christie’s, a global company with world-class experts, is uniquely positioned to explore the relatively new and ever-changing space of digital art: the artists, collectors, market and challenges.”
The representative also pointed to a positive reception to the auction on X, formerly Twitter. Artist Daniel Ambrosi tweeted, “So thrilled to have been a part of this unforgettable experience… and delighted that my artwork is going home with someone!”
A person looks at AI artwork created by Huemin called Dream-0 #9 at a press preview for Augmented Intelligence at Christie’s in New York.
The auction, dubbed Augmented Intelligence, closed Wednesday morning. More than 30 lots attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie’s reports. And there’s a generational twist: The auction house says 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie’s, and 48% of bidders were millennials or members of Gen Z.
“The auction redefines the evolution of art and technology, exploring human agency in the age of AI within fine art,” a promotional statement from Christie’s read. “From robotics to GANs to interactive experiences, artists incorporate and collaborate with artificial intelligence in a variety of mediums including paintings, sculptures, prints, digital art and more.”
(GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are generative AI models that create new data or images that resemble the data they are trained on.)
A person holds a print out of AI artwork created by ClownVamp’s The Junk Machine at a press preview for Augmented Intelligence at Christie’s in New York.
The open letter gathered 6,493 signatures, of which 5,646 were verified. The signers range from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from countries all across the globe.
The highest price in the sale was $277,200 for a work by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It used a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites.
Another work, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Embedding Study 1 & 2, sold for $94,500. It was the result of a text-to-image model trained on altered images of Herndon herself and came to Christie’s following its inclusion in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
