In February 2025, over six thousand people, the majority being artists, signed a letter requesting that Christie’s cancel an auction. The house intended to sell, for the first time in a sale entirely dedicated to the subject, work created with artificial intelligence, and the letter denounced that many of these pieces had been created with models trained on the work of others without licence or payment. The request was clear: if you retain any respect for human artists, cancel.
Christie’s did not cancel. The auction proceeded from 20 February to 5 March, raising $728,784, exceeding the auction house's expectations. The most expensive work, a piece by Refik Anadol created using over a million images from the International Space Station, sold for $277,200, surpassing its maximum estimate. The protest and the record occurred simultaneously, without hindrance. That simultaneity reveals something about the current functioning of the art market that extends beyond AI.
The letter mentioned "many" works, not all, without specifying which ones. This leaves the reproach hovering over the entire auction without addressing any specific piece, which is unfair to some of the artists, as those present were not all engaged in the same practice. Harold Cohen had been programming his own system since the 1960s, constructed rule by rule; he did not download anyone else's work. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst were exhibiting a work critical of training data and consent, and they have established an initiative to allow artists to determine if their work is included in machine training sets and to opt out. To group them with those who merely type a prompt into an opaque commercial generator is to ignore the nuance. That the auction generated revenue does not prove these models are legal, nor that society has accepted anything: it merely proves that it sold.
The controversy did not diminish the value of the sale; it coexisted with it and likely enhanced it. An AI art auction surrounded by public polemic, with six thousand signatures and media headlines, is a more interesting, more discussed, and more desirable event than a quiet auction that no one notices. Conflict is not an obstacle for the market: it is material that the market exploits. The attention generated by the protest is the same attention that revalues the subject of the protest.
We already knew this from other corners of contemporary art. Art that denounces speculation is sold as a speculative asset; institutional critique is collected as a matter of course. What the market purchases is not despite the critique, but the critique itself, converted into a sign that the work addresses something vital. The Christie’s auction applies that old logic to new material. The debate over whether AI exploits artists does not lower the price of AI-generated work; it is incorporated into the aura of the work, rendering it more of its time, more urgent, and more marketable. Signing the letter and bidding in the room are not contradictory gestures from the market's perspective: both are ways of acknowledging that something of importance is occurring. It matters, and that is what sells.
Christie’s sold those works while courts across the globe remain undecided on whether training a model on copyrighted material without permission constitutes a legal act or a massive misappropriation. Litigation is ongoing, legislation is being drafted, and licences do not yet exist. In this vacuum, the market does not wait. It does not pause for the legality of data to be clarified before assigning a price to what is produced with it. It acts in advance, sets values, establishes records, and with every hammer fall, it constructs a fait accompli: when the law arrives, if it arrives, it will encounter a market that has been operating for years as if the matter were resolved. Price precedes law; once established, it is exceedingly difficult to retract.
The art market possesses the capacity to normalise anything before a decision is reached on its acceptability: it does not require legitimacy, only that it sells. That which is paid for becomes, by the very act of payment, something serious, something that exists, something that must be reckoned with. The protest movement believed it was halting an injustice. It may have been correct regarding the injustice, but it became part of the event it helped to consecrate: in this market, even the voice declaring 'this should not be sold' ultimately increases the price of what is being sold.
On the open conversation
This text originates from the Christie’s “Augmented Intelligence” auction (February–March 2025), the inaugural thematic sale dedicated to AI art at a major house, which raised $728,784 despite an open letter, now bearing over six thousand signatures, requesting its cancellation due to the use of unlicensed training models. I do not assert that the models employed were unlawful, a matter that remains in litigation, nor that all artists in the sale utilised third-party data: some employed proprietary systems and others produced work critical of that very data, and the letter did not identify specific lots. The controversy did not impede the sale but rather coexisted with its success; the market establishes prices within the vacuum that the courts have yet to fill, normalising through value what the law has not yet determined. This continues a line of inquiry I initiated in “Art as an asset” and “Against the optimised life”. Should anyone wish to intervene from the perspective of the art market, copyright law, or AI criticism, this notebook remains open.
Previous in the series: Against the optimised life: which forms of culture resist incorporation
Next in the series: Culture in Málaga and the distribution of duration
Sources
Christie’s, 'Augmented Intelligence' (online sale 23942), 20 February to 5 March 2025, 34 lots. Presented by the house as its first auction dedicated exclusively to AI-created art and the first thematic AI sale at a major house (press release dated 7 February 2025). Official total: $728,784, including buyer’s premium. 'Machine Hallucinations – ISS Dreams – A', by Refik Anadol, reached $277,200 (maximum estimate $200,000), the highest price of the sale. Christie’s stated that the total exceeded its initial estimate; specialised media placed it at approximately $600,000, a figure not present in the official press release. The sell-through rate is not included in the official release: ARTnews reported 82% and Artsy 88%.
Open letter to Christie’s, published on 8 February 2025, currently with 6,566 signatures (5,720 verified): 'Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license'; 'we ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction'. The letter did not identify the questioned lots.
Response from a Christie’s spokesperson (reproduced by Artnet News and ARTnews): 'The artists represented in this sale all 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.'
Regarding the diversity of practices: Harold Cohen developed the AARON system from the late 1960s (Whitney Museum); Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst presented work from the xhairymutantx series, critical of training data and identity (Whitney Biennial 2024), and co-founded the Spawning initiative; Refik Anadol employed a corpus of over 1.2 million images from the International Space Station and satellites. There is no public image-by-image licence audit of that corpus, and this text does not assert the illegality of any specific model.
Market precedent: Sotheby’s held the monographic capsule auction 'Exorbitant Stage: Botto' in October 2024 ($351,600, six lots), which positions 'Augmented Intelligence' as a relevant step, rather than the first presence of AI at auction.