The highest price paid at auction for an artwork created using artificial intelligence (AI) is $432,000 (£334,144), paid for a “painting” called Portrait of Edmond de Belamy on 25 October 2018. The portrait (of an imaginary person) was created by a type of AI called a Generative Adversarial Network, which was set up by members of the French art collective Obvious Art.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) work by pitting two neural networks against each other to develop new images based on a library of existing images (in this case a dataset of 15,000 portraits painted by artists between the 14th and 20th centuries).
In the Obvious Art collective’s GAN algorithm, which was based on the work of open-source AI programmer Robbie Barrat (USA), one network (the generator) was tasked with iteratively generating images based on the pre-existing data set, while the other (the discriminator) was tasked with identifying the generator’s work. The process concludes when the generator can create images that the discriminator cannot distinguish from the paintings in the original dataset. The striking end result vastly exceeded its auction house estimate of $7,000–$10,000.
The applications of GAN are many and various, but it is the intriguing way in which the AIs in the GAN build up an independent understanding of the world they see through pictures; this is truly independent from the ‘taught’ perception of machine vision we have today and will benefit the likes of automated vehicles in the future.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
History of Auctioneering
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-expensive-guitar-sold-at-auction
A wall calendar featuring sketches of costume designs for characters from Alice in Wonderland was sold to an anonymous bidder for £36,000 (then US$57,848; €39,804) as part of a fundraising auction held in aid of the Muir Maxwell Trust and the Fettes Foundation (both UK). The auction took place at The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party held on The Queen’s Lawn at Fettes College, Edinburgh, UK on 3 July 2011.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/82585-most-expensive-calendar-sold-at-auction
The most expensive tweet sold at auction is a tweet originally posted by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (USA), which sold as a nonfungible token (NFT) for $2,915,835 (£2,101,470 / €2,449,150), on 21 March 2021.
The tweet – which holds the Guinness World Records title of First tweet – was first posted in 21 March 2006 and simply reads “just setting up my twttr”. Proceeds of the auction were donated to charity.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
A baseball was sold at Guernsey’s auction house, New York City, USA for $3,054,000 (£1,874,655) including commission, to Todd McFarlane on 12 January 1999. The ball was the one that was hit by Mark McGwire of the St Louis Cardinals for his 70th and final home run in his record-setting season in 1998.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
The most expensive banknote sold at auction is an 1890 United States $1,000 Treasury Note, which sold for $3.29 million (£2.6 million) at Heritage Auctions (USA) on 10 January 2014.
The note is known as the “Grand Watermelon” note, due to the three prominent zeros on the reverse that resemble the fruit. The notes are extremely rare, and only three specimens are available to collectors.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
An armchair made by Irish-born designer Eileen Gray around 1917 to 1919 and belonging to Yves Saint Laurent (France), sold at auction for €21.9 million (then £19.4 million; US$28 million). The buyer, Cheska Vallois (France), was the same dealer who originally sold the chair to the French designer in the 1970s. The auction took place at Christie’s in Paris, France, on 24-26 February 2009.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
The most expensive camera sold at auction is a prototype Leica 35mm film camera, which was sold to a private collector from Asia for €2.40 million (£2.13 million; $2.95 million), at the WestLicht Photographica auction in Vienna, Austria, on 10 March 2018. The early model, known as the Leica 0-series No.122, was one of just 25 produced for testing in 1923 – two years before the first Leica camera went on sale to the public. The starting price was €400,000 (£356,000; $492,000).
The previous record holder was another Leica 0-series No.122 camera, which sold at the same auction house on 12 May 2012 for €2.16 million (£1.73 million; $2.8 million).
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
The most expensive flag sold at auction is an American Revolutionary War Battleflag (1776–1779), which went to an anonymous buyer on 14 June 2006 for $12,336,000 (£6,707,264), including buyer’s premium, at Sotheby’s in New York, USA. The regimental standard of the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons was captured by British cavalry officer, Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton at Pound Ridge, Westchester County, New York, USA, on 2 July 1779 and subsequently shipped to England, where it remained until it was put up for auction by one of his descendants. It is the earliest surviving American flag of any kind with a field of 13 red and white stripes.
The flag was one of four rare Revolutionary War battle flags sold at the auction: three other flags, from a Virginia regiment, thought to have been captured at the Battle of Waxhaws, near the border of North and South Carolina, on 29 May 1780, sold for $5.05 million.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
The most expensive hat sold at auction is a black felt bicorn hat that belonged to the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). It sold for €1,932,000 (£1,687,119; $2,114,284) including premium at the Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau, France, on 19 November 2023.
The hat, which was estimated to sell at €600,000-800,000, was last owned by businessman Jean-Louis Noisiez, who died in 2022, and has now been purchased by an anonymous buyer. The final hammer price was likely higher than expected as a result of the pending release of a biopic film about the French emperor, directed by Ridley Scott, premiering in November 2023.
According to Osenat, the former French emperor owned 120 hats, yet only about 16 are known to still exist today. This particular bicorn was used by Bonaparte in the middle of the Empire, around the 1806–15 period.
Previously, the most expensive hat sold at auction was another formerly owned by Napoleon. It sold for €1,884,000 (£1,498,496; $2,348,594) on 15 November 2014, also at the Osenat auction house. It was sold by the Grimaldi family, the rulers of the Principality of Monaco, and purchased by an anonymous collector from South Korea.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source:
By 9 May1997, works of art by Pablo Picasso (Spain) had been sold at auction no fewer than 3,579 times. The total value of these sales has been £668,817,963.
Picasso was an artistic pioneer with a hand in every art movement of the century.
Country:
Year:
Date:
Source: