Christie’s Contested AI Sale Reels in a Younger Crowd

Spotlight Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Call and Response Tendai Mutambu

Christie’s Augmented Intelligence sale, which closed Wednesday after two weeks of online bidding, brought in a total of $728,784 (all prices USD) with fees, and a sellthrough rate of 82 percent, outperforming expectations, the auction house said.

First-time registrations accounted for 37 percent of total participation, with close to half of bidders from millennial and ‘Gen Z’ demographics. This first major auction dedicated to digital artists and AI works saw 28 of 34 lots finding buyers.

Nicole Sales Giles, VP and director of digital art sales at Christie’s, said that the sale was partly a test of recognition, to see whether collectors and the industry would acknowledge digital artists’ ‘influence and significance’ in today’s art landscape.

‘The results of this sale confirmed that they did.’

The expanded buyer’s pool is arguably correlated with the wide-ranging price points—from $1,764 on the low end for Vanessa Rosa’s sculpture and NFT Little Martians & Abraham (2024) to Refik Anadol‘s six-figure data painting collating images of space using AI, which led the sale at $277,200.

Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations - ISS Dreams – A (2022) was the only lot in the six-figure range to find a buyer, hammering above its high estimate of $200,000 at $277,200.

Meanwhile, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst‘s Embedding Study #1 and #2 (2024), two photo-transfer prints of an AI-generated person modelled after Herndon that featured at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, came in second in terms of price at $94,500 (high estimate of $90,000).

Alexander Reben‘s Untitled Robot Painting (2025), which was estimated between $100 and $1,728,000, well captured the house’s optimistic, but cautious ambition for AI art.

Reben’s AI-generated painting, which was rendered in real time during the auction’s run in proportion to bid increases, attracted the most interest—counting some 33 bidders the day before the sale’s conclusion on 4 March—but only achieved $8,190.

Likewise, 15 bidders competed to take home ‘AI artist’ Deepblack’s oil landscape, DeepBlack #100 (2020), which saw the second most interest at the time of browsing. But the work only surpassed its predicted ceiling by 16 dollars, estimated between $1,000 and $2,000.

Artists who have long experimented with digital tools saw mixed results despite higher overall price points. Computer art pioneer Charles Csuri’s Bspline Men (1966) ranked third in terms of price at $50,400, but fell short of a low estimate of $55,000.

Last month, over 6,000 artists petitioned Christie’s to stop the auction, citing works made using AI models that have been trained on copyrighted material without a license. —[O]

Main image: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Embedding Study 1 & 2 (2024). From the 'xhairymutantx' series. Courtesy Christie's.