Thousands of artists have called on Christie’s to cancel an upcoming auction of art made by artificial intelligence.
In an open letter to the house signed by almost 4,000 people, they are demanding Christie’s bins its “Augmented Intelligence” auction, slated to run from February 20 to March 5. It’s billed as the “first-ever AI-dedicated sale at a major auction house.”
Artists Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz have signed the letter. They are taking AI companies to court over claims that the firms’ image generation tools have used their work without permission.
The auction comprises 20 lots spanning five decades across a range of mediums. A quarter of the works are digitally native, such as NTFs, while the others are physical, including sculpture, works on paper, paintings, and light boxes. Refik Anadol, Harold Cohen, Pindar Van Arman, and Holly Herndon are among the artists involved. Estimates for the work range from $15,000 to $250,000, and Christie’s expects to take at least $600,000 from the sale.
“Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrights work without a license,” the letter reads. “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.”
The letter to Christie’s concludes: “Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work. We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”
In response, Christie’s sent ARTnews this statement: “The artists represented in this sale have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work.”
ARTnews spoke to Nicole Sales Giles, Christie’s vice-president and director of digital art sales, last week before the open letter was published. She said one of “Augmented Intelligence’s” major themes is “that AI is not a replacement for human creativity.”
“You can see a lot of human agency in all of these works,” she said. “In every single work, you’re seeing a collaboration between an AI model, a robot, or however the artist has chosen to incorporate AI. It is showing how AI is enhancing creativity and not becoming a substitute for it.”
One of the auction’s headline lots is a 12-foot-tall robot by Alexander Reuben. Guided by the artist’s AI model, it will paint a new section of a canvas live during the sale every time the work receives a bid.
Anadol called the open letter “funny” on X and said it represents “the basic problem of the entire ecosystem, results of lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven by dark minds.”
He added that “[the] majority of the artists in this [auction] specifically pushing and using their own datasets + their own models!”
The digital artist Beeple has also posted on social media in support of Christie’s auction. On X, he uploaded an image of a robot vandalizing a poster for the sale while holding a human on a leash like a dog. The caption reads: “THE WAR OF ART.”
Digital artist Jack Butcher has used the open letter to create a minted digital artwork called Undersigned Artists. On X he wrote that the work “takes a collective act of dissent – an appeal to halt an AI art auction – and turns it into the very thing it resists: a minted piece of digital art. The letter, originally a condemnation of AI-generated works trained on unlicensed human labor, now becomes part of the system it critiques.”
Christie’s will accept cryptocurrency payments for the majority of lots in the sale.
In November, a record price at auction was set by a work created for a robot powered by AI. The painting, made by Ai-Da, a humanoid robot, sold for more than $1 million at Sotheby’s.
