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People look at Linda Dounia Rebeiz's 14° 40′ 34.46″ N 17° 26′ 15.14″ W, which is displayed during a preview for a first-ever AI-dedicated art sale at Christie's Auctions in New York City, on Feb. 5, 2025.
Christie’s plans its first AI art auction
The esteemed art auction house Christie’s will hold its first-ever show dedicated solely to AI-generated art later this month.
The event, called “Augmented Intelligence” will kick off on Feb. 20 and conclude on March 5. It will feature art from the 1960s artist and programmer Harold Cohen, as well as contemporary artists including Pindar Van Arman and Holly Herndon. An autonomous robot made by Alexander Reben will paint live during the show in Christie’s galleries in New York’s Rockefeller Center.
But the intersection of art and AI is a source of tension in the art world as many believe that popular AI developers have improperly trained their image-generation models on copyrighted artworks. More than 3,000 artists signed a petition calling for Christie’s to cancel the show. “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 petition states. “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 defended its sale in a statement to TechCrunch. “The artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections,” a Christie’s spokesperson said. “The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work and in most cases, AI is being employed in a controlled manner, with data trained on the artists’ own inputs.”
What are NFTs, and how do they fit into the crypto landscape?
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, Eurasia Group senior advisor and former MEP, discusses trends in big tech, privacy protection and cyberspace:
You may have heard that Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet as an NFT in an auction, but what are NFTs?
Well, I had to do a little homework. NFT stands for "non-fungible tokens." They are unique digital files stored in a block chain and essentially a rare piece of data that becomes an asset. Also, because it can be authenticated. Now, actual ownership is one-off, unique, so unique that Christie's sold one of the highest paid pieces of art by a living artist ever as an NFT, for $69.3 million. And I guess just like with art on canvas, whether that was worth it is a matter of personal taste.
How do NFTs fit into or complicate the crypto landscape?
Now, for one, they're backed by some of the same investors that created crypto currencies. They're also growing exponentially in value, almost 300% in 2020 alone. So, I'm keeping an eye out for where we will be at the end of this year. But does this mean all upside and opportunity? Not so much. The environment, for one, is already paying a high price for all the crypto mining. And with so much hype, there are also questions about whether NFTs will remain available in the future.
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