Is A Random Unknown Artist More Valuable Than Picasso? AI Thinks So.
What’s worth more—a Picasso or a painting by a street artist no one has heard of? According to the AI model we built, the answer is the latter. That surprising result came out of an experiment I ran with a data scientist and an AI expert from Silicon Valley. Our goal was to see whether artificial intelligence could bring more transparency—and, perhaps, greater fairness—to the art market. The timing is urgent. The art world has been in a recession for 15 years, galleries are closing, young collectors are holding back, and artists trying to make it in the major market centers are living on the brink of poverty. The market is opaque and elitist. More than 50% of auction value in contemporary art comes from just twenty artists. The attention driven by blockbuster exhibitions and record prices is reserved for a handful of artists and galleries—under the pretense that their art is simply “better.” But is it really? Related Articles To find out, we built an AI model to decode how artistic value is determined …
