At Christie’s, the first ever AI-dedicated auction at a major auction house exceeds pre-sale expectations; Millennial and Gen Z comprise half of participants.
Augmented Intelligence, the first artificial intelligence-dedicated sale at a major auction house, closed the morning of Wednesday, March 5, 2025. The auction—which encompassed more than 30 lots with works by respected digital artists—attracted hundreds of bids and the results exceeded pre-sale expectations. The sale totaled $728,784, surpassing its initial estimate. The sale also generated new participants: 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie’s, and 48% of bidders were Millennials and Gen Z.
The highest price in the sale came for a work by Refik Anadol: Machine Hallucinations – ISS Dreams – A, which sold for $277,200, surpassing its high estimate. This work by the esteemed artist is a dynamic painting, employing a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites, reimagined through machine intelligence. The painting is a part of Anadol’s project investigating collective visual memories of space, nature, and urbanity, exploring AI’s capacity to imagine new forms of cartographic aesthetics.
Another notable price came for Embedding Study 1 & 2 by Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst which also surpassed its high estimate to achieve $94,500. Part of an exploration into AI’s role in shaping identity, the work emerges from a text-to-image model trained on altered images of Herndon, exaggerating her defining features to interrogate representation. The work came to Christie’s following its inclusion in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
Nicole Sales Giles, VP and Director of Digital Art Sales, Christie’s, comments, “At Christie’s, we are dedicated to championing the artists of our time. With this project, our goal was to spotlight the brilliant creative voices pushing the boundaries of technology and art. We also hoped collectors and the wider community would recognize their influence and significance in today’s artistic landscape. The results of this sale confirmed that they did. Witnessing such overwhelming public support for this auction has been truly inspiring. I am honored to use Christie’s platform to ignite meaningful conversations about the future of creativity.”
