The AI-Art Gold Rush Is Here
The images are huge and square and harrowing: a form, reminiscent of a face, engulfed in fiery red-and-yellow currents; a head emerging from a cape collared with glitchy feathers, from which a shape suggestive of a hand protrudes; a heap of gold and scarlet mottles, convincing as fabric, propping up a face with grievous, angular features. These are part of “Faceless Portraits Transcending Time,” an exhibition of prints recently shown at the HG Contemporary gallery in Chelsea, the epicenter of New York’s contemporary-art world. All of them were created by a computer.
The catalog calls the show a “collaboration between an artificial intelligence named AICAN and its creator, Dr. Ahmed Elgammal,” a move meant to spotlight, and anthropomorphize, the machine-learning algorithm that did most of the work. According to HG Contemporary, it’s the first solo gallery exhibit devoted to an AI artist.
If they hadn’t found each other in the New York art scene, the players involved could have met on a Spike Jonze film set: a computer scientist commanding five-figure print sales from software that generates inkjet-printed images; a former hotel-chain financial analyst turned Chelsea techno-gallerist with apparent ties to fine-arts nobility; a venture capitalist with two doctoral degrees in biomedical informatics; and an art consultant who put the whole thing together, A-Team–style, after a chance encounter at a blockchain conference. Together, they hope to reinvent visual art, or at least to cash in on machine-learning hype along the way.
The gallery show might just be a coming-out party for Elgammal’s venture-backed, fine-art econometrics start-up. The computer scientist has created some legitimately striking pieces. But he and his partners also want to sell AICAN as a “solution” to art, one that could predict forthcoming trends and perhaps even produce works in those styles. The idea is so contemporary and extravagant, it might qualify as art better than the strange portraits on exhibit at the gallery.
Tbegan in earnest last October, when the New York auction house Christie’s , an algorithm-generated print in the style of 19th-century European portraiture, for
