Portrait of Edmond Belamy was sold at Christie’s for $432,500 – 45 times its estimated worth.
Obvious, portrait of Edmond Belamy. Photo: Obvious/The Art Newspaper
The algorithm called Obvious that created the work is a product of Paris-based researchers Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier. It consists of two parts – a generator and a discriminator.
“We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th. The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the Generator. The aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits,” Hugo Caselles-Dupré explained before the auction. “We found that portraits provided the best way to illustrate our point, which is that algorithms are able to emulate creativity.”
The Parisian team is not the only one working in this field. Ahmed Elgammal, director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey, experiments with another system programmed to create new art different from that it has in the data set consisting of various paintings from the 14th century on. Interestingly, much of the algorithm’s art is abstract.
Portrait of Edmond Belamy was initially estimated to go between $7,000 and $10,000, but after heavy bidding in the Prints & Multiples sale its price reached $432,500, which shows a growing interest to machine-generated art.
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