Is the Art Market Ready to Embrace Work Made by Artificial Intelligence? Christie’s Will Test the Waters This Fall
Is the Art Market Ready to Embrace Work Made by
Artificial Intelligence? Christie’s Will Test the Waters This Fall
The auction house is selling an AI-produced work of art
for the first time this fall.
By Naomi Rea, August 20, 2018
Christie’s New York will make history this fall when it
becomes the first auction house to sell a work of art made by artificial
intelligence. The print on canvas, a product of an algorithm developed by the
French art collective Obvious, will be included in the auction house’s prints
and multiples sale October 23-25.
Hugo Caselles-Dupré, a member of the Paris-based
collective, told artnet News that they were “interested in the philosophical
approach behind this,” he said. “Can an algorithm be creative? If so, this
algorithm is the closest to the human mind’s creativity.”
The work was created using a model called a Generative
Adversarial Network. The artists first fed a generator a dataset of 15,000
portraits done between the 14th and 20th centuries. It then created new works
based on the training set until it was able to fool a test designed to
distinguish whether an image was made by human or machine.
The resulting work, titled Portrait of Edmond de Belamy,
depicts a man in a dark coat and white collar with indecipherable facial
features that reside somewhere in the uncanny valley. The unique piece, a
gold-framed canvas print that is currently on view in Christie’s London
showroom, is estimated at $7,000-10,000. The collective says it will use the
proceeds from the sale to further train its algorithm, finance the
computational power needed to make such works, and experiment with 3D modeling.
The Christie’s sale constitutes an important validation
in the realm of AI art. Although there are many so-called “creative coders” who
use similar technologies to improve web experience, few are considered
contemporary artists. The members of Obvious see themselves as conceptual
artists whose main goal is to democratize Generative Adversarial Networks and
legitimize AI-produced art.
“We wanted to propose this new approach to a more
traditional market rather than the tech area,” Caselles-Dupré said. “At the
beginning it was difficult to be understood by the traditional art market
because they were looking at us like, ‘Who are those guys? What is this new
weird stuff?’ But the more we’ve explained what we’re doing, what we want to
share, and what we want to say, the more the art world is paying attention to
our work.”
Following the Christie’s sale, Obvious plans to work with
brands and galleries to expand the movement. “We really believe that AI can be
a new tool for art,” Caselles-Dupré said. “In 1850, when the camera showed up,
it was only used by highly qualified engineers and so it was not considered for
its artistic potential. We think we are in the same situation, because people
view us as engineers but we really think this type of technology will be used
more and more in art.”
The collective began a conversation with Christie’s
following a London symposium on the implications of blockchain for the art
world. “Christie’s continually stays attuned to changes in the art market and
how technology can impact the creation and consumption of art,” said the
auction house’s head of prints and multiples, Richard Lloyd, in a statement.
“AI has already been incorporated as a tool by contemporary artists and as this
technology further develops, we are excited to participate in these continued
conversations.”
Edmond de Belamy is one of 11 portraits of the fictional
Belamy family, which is named after Ian Goodfellow, the AI researcher who
invented the Generative Adversarial Network method in 2014. (“Goodfellow”
roughly translates to the French bel ami.) Another portrait from the family, Le
Comte de Belamy, sold to Parisian collector Nicolas Laugero-Lassere earlier
this year.
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