Edmond de Belamy

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Edmond de Belamy
Edmond de Belamy.png
ArtistObvious (collective)
MediumInk
SubjectMale portrait
Dimensions70 cm× 70 cm(27.5 in× 27.5 in)

Edmond de Belamy is a generative adversarial network (GAN) portrait painting constructed in 2018 by Paris-based arts collective Obvious. [1] Printed on canvas, the work belongs to a series of generative images called La Famille de Belamy. The name Belamy is a tribute to Ian Goodfellow, inventor of GANs. In French, "bel ami" means "good friend", a translated pun on Goodfellow. [2]

Contents

Auction

It gained media attention after Christie's announced its intention to auction the piece as the first artwork created using artificial intelligence to be featured in a Christie's Images New York auction.

Six minutes into bidding, it went up to US$ 350,000. [3] After the bidding, it surpassed pre-auction estimates, which valued it at US$7,000 to US$10,000; it sold for US$432,500 on 25 October 2018 instead, [4] [5] making it the second most expensive artwork in the auction, just cheaper than Andy Warhol’s artwork, the 254 cm × 254 cm 1981 artwork that was sold for US$780,500, Myths. [3] [6]

Method

Obvious's members are Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier. Caselles-Dupré stated that the algorithm used a "discriminator". [3] The image was created by an algorithm that was trained on a set of 15,000 portraits from the online art encyclopedia WikiArt, spanning the 14th to the 19th centuries. [7]

It is manually signed at the bottom-right with , which is part of the algorithm code that produced it.

Description

The piece is a portrait of a somewhat blurry man. It is a print on canvas measuring 27 12 × 27 12 in (70 cm × 70 cm) set within a gilded wood frame.

Reception

The piece has been criticized because it was created using a generative adversarial network (GAN) software package based on prior research by others and implemented by Robbie Barrat, an AI artist who was not affiliated with Obvious, leading to allegations that Obvious contributed minimally to the final work product. Posts on the project's issue tracker show Obvious members requesting that Barrat provide support and custom features. [2]

The piece has also been criticized for whether it is real "art" or not. [8] Art critic Jonathan Jones did not acknowledge Edmond de Belamy as art. [9]

The piece has been placed within a tradition of works calling into question the basis of the modern art market, and highlighting the comic aspects of technology. [10] Research has used Edmond de Belamy to show how anthropomorphizing AI can affect allocations of responsibility and credit to artists. [11] [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital art</span> Collective term for art that is generated digitally with a computer

Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process. It can also refer to computational art that uses and engages with digital media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christie's</span> British auction house

Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Amsterdam, Geneva, Shanghai, and Dubai. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François Pinault. In 2022 Christie's sold US$8.4 billion in art and luxury goods, an all-time high for any auction house. On 15 November 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold at Christie's in New York for $450 million to Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, the highest price ever paid for a painting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generative art</span> Art created by a set of rules, often using computers

Generative art is post-conceptual art that has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist. In some cases the human creator may claim that the generative system represents their own artistic idea, and in others that the system takes on the role of the creator.

Computer art is art in which computers play a role in the production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many traditional disciplines are now integrating digital technologies and, as a result, the lines between traditional works of art and new media works created using computers has been blurred. For instance, an artist may combine traditional painting with algorithm art and other digital techniques. As a result, defining computer art by its end product can thus be difficult. Computer art is bound to change over time since changes in technology and software directly affect what is possible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human image synthesis</span> Computer generation of human images

Human image synthesis is technology that can be applied to make believable and even photorealistic renditions of human-likenesses, moving or still. It has effectively existed since the early 2000s. Many films using computer generated imagery have featured synthetic images of human-like characters digitally composited onto the real or other simulated film material. Towards the end of the 2010s deep learning artificial intelligence has been applied to synthesize images and video that look like humans, without need for human assistance, once the training phase has been completed, whereas the old school 7D-route required massive amounts of human work .

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26 October 1993 is an artwork created in 1993 as a collaboration between English artists Henry Bond and Sam Taylor-Wood, both of whom were involved in the Young British Artists scene of contemporary art. It is a pastiche or remaking of a well-known photographic portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that was made by Annie Leibovitz a few hours before Lennon's murder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WikiArt</span> User-generated website displaying artworks

WikiArt is a visual art wiki, active since 2010.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generative adversarial network</span> Deep learning method

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">StyleGAN</span> Novel generative adversarial network

StyleGAN is a generative adversarial network (GAN) introduced by Nvidia researchers in December 2018, and made source available in February 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artificial intelligence art</span> Machine application of knowledge of human aesthetic expressions

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Winkelmann</span> American digital artist

Michael Joseph Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator known for selling NFTs. In his art, he uses various media to create comical, phantasmagoric works that make political and social commentary while using pop culture figures as references. British auction house Christie's has called him "A visionary digital artist at the forefront of NFTs". Beeple was introduced to NFTs in October 2020 and credits Pak for providing his first "primer" on selling NFTs. The NFT associated with Everydays: the First 5000 Days, a collage of images from his "Everydays" series, was sold on March 12, 2021, for $69 million in cryptocurrency to an investor in NFTs. It is the first purely non-fungible token to be sold by Christie's. The auction house had previously sold Block 21, an NFT with accompanying physical painting for approximately $130,000 in October 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artbreeder</span> Art website

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Midjourney</span> Image-generating machine learning model

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References

  1. Alleyne, Allyssia (25 October 2018). "AI-produced artwork sells for $433K, smashing expectations". CNN. Archived from the original on 27 January 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
  2. 1 2 Vincent, James (23 October 2018). "How three French students used borrowed code to put the first AI portrait in Christie's". The Verge. Archived from the original on 4 March 2024. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 Kinsella, Eileen (25 October 2018). "The First AI-Generated Portrait Ever Sold at Auction Shatters Expectations, Fetching $432,500—43 Times Its Estimate". Artnet News. Archived from the original on 17 March 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
  4. "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy". Christie's. Live Auction 16388. Archived from the original on 7 July 2023. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  5. Cohn, Gabe (25 October 2018). "AI Art at Christie's Sells for $432,500". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331. Archived from the original on 16 May 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
  6. "Andy Warhol | Myths". Whitney Museum of American Art. P.2010.340. Archived from the original on 5 December 2023. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
  7. Nugent, Ciara (20 August 2018). "How an Art Collective is Using Artificial Intelligence to Make Paintings". Time. Archived from the original on 20 March 2023.
  8. Jones, Jonathan (26 October 2018). "A portrait created by AI just sold for $432,000. But is it really art?". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077. Archived from the original on 20 January 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
  9. Hicks, Olivia (1 March 2019). "ART-ificial Intelligence: The Curious Case of Edmond De Belamy – The Isis". The Isis Magazine. Archived from the original on 2 March 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
  10. Rolez, Anaïs (6 December 2018). "The Mechanical Art of Laughter". Arts. 8 (1). Nantes, France: MDPI (published 21 December 2018): 2. doi: 10.3390/arts8010002 . ISSN   2076-0752.
  11. Epstein, Ziv; Levine, Sydney; Rand, David G.; Rahwan, Iyad (25 September 2020). "Who Gets Credit for AI-Generated Art?". iScience. 23 (9). National Library of Medicine: 101515. Bibcode:2020iSci...23j1515E. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101515 . PMC   7492988 . PMID   32920489.
  12. Ray, Tiernan (18 September 2020). "People's notions about AI are terrible, an MIT study asks whether they can be helped". ZDNet. Archived from the original on 4 October 2023. Retrieved 21 September 2020.