Michael Tyka wanted to get something out of the way. Is it art? Tyka, an artist and software engineer at Google, asked the audience at Christies Art + Tech Summit in New York in June. The events theme was The AI Revolution, and Tyka was referring to artwork created using artificial intelligence.

The question, of course, was rhetorical. He flashed an image of a urinal on two large screens at either side of the stageMarcel Duchamps famous and controversial sculpture Fountain. The audience laughed. Obviously, it can be, he said.

There was otherwise little debate about the artistic merit of AI art at the summit, which attracted players from across the tech, art, and collecting worlds. The bigger questions instead focused on just how much this new form was poised to disrupt the industry.

The location for the discussion was fitting: In October 2018, Christies New York sold an algorithm-generated print that resembled 19th century European portraits, called Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy, for the staggering sum of $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate. The print, by the French collective Obvious, had never been exhibited or sold before coming to auction, and its sale stunned the art world.

But despite the buzz, many in the art community are wrestling with several unanswered questions. For example: When artwork is created by an algorithm, who is the artistthe programmer or the computer? Because many works of AI art are digital, how do you value a creation thats designed to live natively on the internet and be widely shared? And where, exactly, is the market for this new kind of work headed? There are few clear answers.

The de Belamy sale may have been the splashiest AI artrelated event of the past year, but it wasnt the only one. In March, Sothebys sold an AI video installation by the German artist Mario Klingemann, Memories of Passersby I, for $51,012. Last spring, HG Contemporary gallery in New Yorks Chelsea neighborhood hosted what it described as the first solo gallery exhibit devoted to an AI artist, with the show Faceless Portraits Transcending Time, a collaboration between an AI and its creator, Ahmed Elgammal, a computer science professor at Rutgers University.

Prominent art institutions and collections around the world are paying attention. If we look at the larger landscape of whats happening in the art world, and not just in sales, theres a ton of momentum as well as institutional support for whats happening, says Marisa Kayyem, program director of continuing education at Christies Education. Collectors are growing more accustomed to it.

Just like photography never went away, Im pretty sure AI will establish itself as a new media format.

Many people working in the field recoil from the term AI art, finding it both misleading and too specific. Like other programmer-cum-artists, Klingemann, whose work was sold by Sothebys, prefers the term generative art, which includes all works created using algorithms. Generative arts origins date back to the late 1950s.

AI art is really a term the press came up with in the last three to five years, says Jason Bailey, founder of the digital-art blog Artnome, who believes the term conjures up the false impression of robots creating art. Most of the artists I talk to dont like to be called AI artists. But its become shorthand, whether people like it or not, for the work thats being done.

Although the de Belamy portrait is the best-known work of AI art, its a bit of a red herring for those looking to understand the medium. The portrait was created using generative adversarial networks, or GANs. GANs use a sample set of images of art to deduce patterns, and then use that knowledge to replicate what theyve seen, cross-referenced against the originals, creating a stream of new images.

The de Belamy sale came with a dose of controversy: Obvious didnt write the algorithm for itthe collective borrowed it from a young American programmer/artist named Robbie Barrat, who received nothing from the sale of the work. Obvious simply chose the image, printed it, put it in a frame, and signed it with Barrats algorithm.

In other words, de Belamy was sold as a single piece of art, even though the number of images the AI could produce was infinite. But many, if not most, works of AI art arent produced as a single, physical object. They are videos, animations, and everything digital and algorithmic in betweenworks designed to live online and to be shared.

This presents a tricky problem: In an industry that has always created value through scarcity, how do you value a work of art that is inherently nonscarce?

Theres a big change coming, and its one of these tectonic shifts, says Kelani Nichole, founder of Transfer gallery in Los Angeles, which focuses on artists who make computer-based artworks. I think that its about value, and I think were going to be moving away from a scarcity market thats purely a financial instrument.

One answer to the ownership quandary may be blockchain, which can be used to create a token that denotes a digital works authenticity. But Nichole says that might be beside the point to a new generation of younger investors who think differently about art and collecting. People who came of ageand became wealthyin the digital age have different ideas of material scarcity, transparency, and ownership, she says. The experience of a work of art may be more important than a physical object. The way they live is as digital nomads. They dont possess objects in the same way. Its a whole new generation of values, which is not about material scarcity, Nichole says.

Claire Marmion, founder and CEO of Haven Art Group, a fine-art-collection management company based in New York, says collectors are still trying to figure out where the market for AI art is heading, and that it may not be the disruptive force some think it will be. Or, at least, the industry will adapt to it.

The art world has a long tradition of artists bringing in new things and changing the status quo, Marmion says. In terms of valuation, theres a small data set. I dont know about the accuracy of valuation put on at the moment. Its very speculative. Collectors are interested in it, but Im not sure a lot of collectors have embraced it.

Klingemann believes the current buzz will eventually die down, but that AI art isnt going anywhere. Instead, he thinks it will one day be viewed as simply another tool of the artist.

Just like photography never went away, or making movies doesnt, Im pretty sure it will establish itself as a new media format, he says. Right now, of course, its all this mystery about AI, but I expect this to become really just a normal thing, where people will focus on what artists are actually saying with their art.

Original post:

The AI-Art Boom - Barron's