A portrait created by a computer has been sold for $432500 (almost R6.3 million) - nearly 45 times its high estimate - as Christie’s made this month a noteworthy month in the history of art by becoming the first auction house to sell a work created by an algorithm.
The brainchild of artificial intelligence, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy was conceived by a trio of 25-year-old Parisians who call themselves Obvious.
They feed a computer historic data about art and great artists using algorithms - and the computer then interprets and collates the information to come up with new portraits.