Groundbreaking AI art sells at Sotheby's for disappointing amount

Is the art world ready for robots?
Mario Klingemann, Memories of Passersby I (2018) Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Juliana Piskorz8 March 2019

AI art has been making waves, albeit small pixelated ones, for over a year.

Sotheby’s auction house has tried to cash in on the new technology this week by selling a work by Mario Klingemann called Memories of Passerby I.

The piece is a two screen installation, where surreal imaginary portraits are projected on the screens by neural networks. The computer generates new faces as you look at it, based on thousands of photographs of portraits from 17th and 19th centuries. The portraits blur around the edges creating an endless stream of distorted faces, which were inspired by Klingemann’s penchant for Surreal artists Max Ernst.

Sotheby’s follows in the footsteps of New York auction house Christie’s, which sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an algorithm-generated print in the style of a 19th century portraiture for $432,500.

In comparison Klingemann’s AI installation went for a seemingly paltry £32,000, selling in under a minute to an unknown online bidder.

Sotheby’s quotes Andre Breton’s ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ in relation to the pioneering technology behind AI art: “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.”

Perhaps AI art is still too ‘convulsive’ to appeal to a mainstream perception of beauty.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in