Christie’s inaugural "Augmented Intelligence" auction yielded $728,784, exceeding its pre-sale low estimate of $600,000.
Christie’s inaugural "Augmented Intelligence" auction, conducted online from February 20 to March 5, 2025, with a parallel exhibition at its Rockefeller Center galleries in New York, marked a pivotal incursion of AI-generated art into the institutional sphere.
Comprising 34 lots, the sale covered a half-century of computational creativity, featuring foundational figures such as Harold Cohen alongside contemporary artists including Refik Anadol, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Alexander Reben, and Claire Silver. The works spanned painting, sculpture, prints, NFTs, and interactive formats, with digitally native pieces accounting for 26% of the pieces.
The auction brought in $728,784, exceeding its pre-sale low estimate of $600,000 (exclusive of fees), with 28 lots finding buyers for an 82% sell-through rate. Refik Anadol’s "Machine Hallucinations – ISS Dreams – A," derived from over 1.2 million images captured by the International Space Station and satellites, earned the top price of $277,200, surpassing its $200,000 estimate.
A conceptual standout, Alexander Reben’s "Untitled Robot Painting," saw a 10-by-12-foot canvas incrementally painted in oil by a robotic apparatus with each bid, merging generative technology with performative execution.
Demographically, the sale drew a notable 37% of first-time Christie’s bidders, with 48% identified as Millennials or Gen Z, signaling a generational shift in collecting patterns.
Nicole Sales Giles, Christie’s Vice President and Director of Digital Art Sales, positioned the event as a curatorial lens on artists harnessing technology to redefine artistic boundaries.
The auction’s reception was divisive to say the least. An open letter with over 6,400 signatures petitioned Christie’s to halt the sale, citing the use of AI models trained on copyrighted works without artist consent or remuneration. In response, Christie’s maintained that the selected artists operated within established practices, employing self-generated datasets to augment their output, framing AI as an extension of creative agency rather than a replacement.
A Christie’s spokesperson explained that "the artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognised in leading museum collections. 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.”
Married couple, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s work is a collaborative piece and is part of an exploration of how the “concept” of Herndon appears in publicly available AI models.
Mat Dryhurst stated, “This is of interest to us and we have made a lot of art exploring and attempting to intervene in this process as is well within our rights. I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time.”
Anadol also dismissed the backlash, saying it stemmed from “lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria”.
Refik Anadol’s work was developed with AI technology trained on publicly available NASA datasets, which he noted “have been used widely by artists for many decades.” He rejected the idea that his work used unlicensed, copyrighted-trained AI models, calling such a suggestion "factually incorrect."
