NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s announced Augmented Intelligence, an auction comprised solely of art created with AI. This sale is the first ever artificial intelligence-dedicated sale at a major auction house. The offerings include more than 20 lots from pioneering artists working at the intersection of art and technology, including Refik Anadol, Harold Cohen, Pindar Van Arman, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Alexander Reben, Claire Silver, and more. Mediums range from sculpture, painting, prints, works on paper, digitally native works, screens, interactive works, to light boxes. The sale also showcases a selection of artists from NVIDIA’s AI Art Gallery. The sale will be open for bidding from 20 February – 5 March 2025. The full sale will be on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from 20 February – 5 March 2025.
Nicole Sales Giles, VP and Director of Digital Art Sales, Christie’s, comments, "We are thrilled to announce ‘Augmented Intelligence’, an auction dedicated exclusively to AI Art. The sale features extraordinary works created by some of the most innovative minds, spanning from early AI pioneers of the 1960s to contemporary artists. The auction redefines the relationship between art and technology, showing collectors human agency in the age of AI in Fine Art. From robotics to GANs to interactive experiences, artists incorporate artificial intelligence into their practices in many unique ways; we are excited to welcome guests to Rockefeller Center to experience a truly captivating physical exhibition.”
Among the many highlights is Emerging Faces of the 2017 series by leading AI artist Pindar Van Arman (Estimate $180,000-250,000). In the series, two AI agents work simultaneously to collaborate on a series of portraits. One of the agents uses generative AI to imagine and paint faces; the other stops the process once it recognizes the image as a human face. The work on offer comprises nine unique canvases from this series that stand among the first paintings autonomously created by neural networks, a significant milestone in AI-generated art. This series has received international accolade and is represented in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
A more recent example comes to Christie’s following its inclusion in the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Embedding Study 1 & 2 (from the xhairymutantx series) by Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst (Estimate: $70,000–90,000). Part of an ongoing exploration into AI’s role in shaping identity, the work emerges from a text-to-image model trained on altered images of Herndon, exaggerating her defining features to interrogate representation. The project raises questions about agency, authorship, and the evolving relationship between human and algorithmic creativity.
Alexander Reben’s latest work turns generative AI into a live performance, where painting unfolds in real time through an auction-driven process. A large-scale painting robot, guided by Reben’s bespoke code that employs multiple AI models, will be installed at Rockefeller Center. Starting at $100, the robot will paint more of the canvas as bids rise, with each addition proportionate to the price increase. The artwork’s progress will be displayed both onsite and online throughout the exhibition. This marks the first time such a process has been attempted at auction, offering collectors a unique opportunity to engage with an evolving artwork that underscores the expanding role of AI in creative practice.
