Christie’s will hold an auction dedicated exclusively to art created with artificial intelligence (AI), the first of its kind at a major auction house. Open for bids from 20 February to 5 March, the Augmented Intelligence sale will include more than 20 lots spanning over five decades, from pioneering AI artists of the 1960s to contemporary works.
Artists represented in the sale include AI art pioneers like Refik Anadol, Harold Cohen, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Alexander Reben and Claire Silver. Only 26% of the sales will be made up of digitally native works like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to Christie’s, with the rest being light boxes and screens, as well as sculptures, paintings and prints. The auction house estimates the sale will bring in at least $600,000.
One of the highlights will be a 12-ft-tall robot by Reben that will make an oil painting in Christie’s Rockefeller Center space during the auction. With each new online bid the work receives, the robot will paint a new canvas section, guided by Reben’s AI model. Bids start at $100, and the robot will fill out the canvas as the price increases.
Pindar Van Arman’s Emerging Faces (2017) Courtesy Christie's
Another notable lot will be Van Arman’s Emerging Faces (2017), from a series that uses two AI programmes simultaneously—one that is directed to paint a human face and another that stops the work as soon as it recognises the image as a human face. The results are haunting, abstract portraits that are among the first paintings created by neural networks, a type of AI that processes and learns from data.
Also up for sale is husband-and-wife duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s two Embedding Study (2024) works that were included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Featuring a cartoonish character in a puffy spacesuit, the works were created with a text-to-image AI model directed to produce versions of Herndon’s appearance. Christie’s estimates the works will sell for between $70,000 and $90,000.
Christie’s will accept cryptocurrency as payment for the majority of lots (93%) in the sale.
In November, Sotheby’s New York sold a painting by Ai-Da, a humanoid robot powered by AI, for more than $1m with fees.