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Last night Christies did it again!
The auction house sold an iffy object for an astronomical price.
What Christies claimed was the first portrait generated by an algorithm to come up for auction.
In this world, stagecraft really works.
This opens the gates for more of the same.
Mission accomplished, Christies.
The work was made by a French group of students of machine learning and business school.
They go by the fitting name Obvious.
(You cant make this stuff up.)
The picture is a typical computer-printed ink-on-canvass image.
This one depicts a blurry portrait of a man dressed in all black with a stark white collar.
He has olden-style longish dark hair in a pageboy cut.
All unfinished around the edges, resembles a fuzzy 17th-century Dutch portrait.
In the New YorkTimessomeone already compared it to a Rembrandt.
Really, its a poster.
It is an open-source program called GAN.
Obvious fed a computer around 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th century.
The machine was then programmed to then create an optical common denominator from the data and print it out.
Click print, done.
He then chirped, Were the people who sold the Leonardo for $450 million.
Indeed, Christies told theTimesthat this is a good way to ease buyers … into works made with AI.
So much for integrity, scholarship, research, and transparency.
An expert in the field rightly scoffed that the Christies work is AI Art 101.
People have done it with Hollywood blockbusters arranged by superhero, color, setting, and even credits.
Its been done with porn films that render one Ur-orgy, superstar, or set of sexual fetishes.
Julie Mehretus paintings are said to be handmade versions of the same visual overlay strategies.
World famous photographer Thomas Ruff has made, shown, and sold pictures like this for almost 20 years.
The question is, why did so many collectors go crazy for it?
