Creative GenerationVerified
Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, April 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
Christie's offered 'Portrait of Edmond de Belamy' (2018) by the Paris-based collective Obvious at its October 23-25 Prints and Multiples sale in New York, making it the first AI-generated artwork to sell at a major auction house. The work, produced using a generative adversarial network, sold for $432,500, more than 43 times its pre-sale high estimate of $10,000.
Details
The work was produced using a generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on a dataset of 15,000 historical portraits spanning the 14th to 20th centuries. Christie's listed the medium of the lot as 'Generative Adversarial Network print, on canvas,' with no individual human artist attributed as creator. The sale was part of Christie's regular Prints & Multiples auction in New York. Christie's specialist Richard Lloyd noted the auction house's intent to 'participate in these continued conversations' about AI's role in art creation.
Products affected
Christie's Prints & Multiples auctionchristies.com
Sources & Evidence
News Article
Cite this record
Trace Foundation. (2026). Christie's: Christie's offered 'Portrait of Edmond de Belamy' (2018) by the Paris-based collective Obvious at its October 23-25 Prints and Multiples sale in New York, making it the first AI-generated artwork to sell at a major auction house. The work, produced using a generative adversarial network, sold for $432,500, more than 43 times its pre-sale high estimate of $10,000 (data as of 2026-04-27) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/ab7759d4-0a04-4493-9ca9-8aacd9eee80a. Accessed September 11, 2026.
- Stable link
- https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/ab7759d4-0a04-4493-9ca9-8aacd9eee80a
- Data as of
- April 27, 2026
- Last verified
- April 22, 2026
Other practices by Christie's
Creative GenChristie's deployed a dedicated auction for artworks created using artificial intelligence, titled 'Augmented Intelligence,' running from February 20 to March 5, 2025, billed by Christie's as the first sale exclusively focused on AI art at a major auction house. The 34-lot online and in-person auction totaled $728,784, surpassing its $600,000 pre-sale estimate.OtherChristie's offers an annual Art + Tech Summit, launched in 2018, that brings together artists, technologists, academics, and industry leaders to discuss the intersection of emerging technology — including artificial intelligence — with the art and luxury markets. The summit does not involve Christie's directly deploying AI, but is a recurring platform for discourse Christie's hosts about AI's role in culture.
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