Is the Art Market AI-Proof?

Business of Fashion

27-05-2025

Welcome to Arts Radar, a monthly column by Marc Spiegler breaking down key developments in contemporary art and the wider worlds of design, music, cinema and television.
There's no shortage of AI-catastrophising in the arts these days — and, frankly, it's justified.
Sapping our attention away from culture with a capital C, the world is awash in AI slop such as the absurdist AI-generated Ballerina Cappucina and Cappuccino Assassino characters at the heart of the viral 'Italian Brainrot' TikTok videos. Amazon's Kindle marketplace teems with AI-generated facsimiles of bestsellers, just as Spotify has to constantly cull AI cover versions of hits uploaded by royalties chasers. Last year, Hollywood actors and screenwriters went on strike, in part to protect their livelihoods from generative AI, while in March, thousands of artists signed an open letter calling on Christie's to cancel an auction focussed on art made using artificial intelligence.
All of which makes particularly bold Chanel's mid-April announcement that it will fund a new centre focussed on artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital imaging at CalArts — the Los Angeles art school whose alumni include John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie, Tim Burton and Sofia Coppola.
'In the ever-changing age of AI, the Chanel Center for Artists and Technology will enable and encourage creatives across disciplines to harness that innovation — to take human imagination further than ever before,' said Chanel's head of arts and culture Yana Peel in a statement.
The budget? The French fashion giant isn't saying but CalArts president Ravi S. Rajan told Artnet: 'I'd hazard a guess it could be the largest for any art school ever. It's super meaningful and transformational.'
To be clear, I'm not an AI optimist. There's no doubt that artificial intelligence threatens jingle-composers, movie extras, stunt people, catalog-essay writers, translators, graphic designers and countless other creative roles. And while AI will benefit creators already operating at the highest levels — allowing them to ramp up production while lowering costs — those breaking into the sector will suffer as it eliminates many entry-level gigs. 'When I started at Christie's, they would hand me a transparency of a Picasso and send me to the library to find all the books in which it was cited,' said Dirk Boll, now the auction house's deputy chairman for 20th and 21st century art. 'AI does that in a nano-second now.'
But the culture sector's beef with AI is also philosophic, tied to the notion that the artist is an auteur not a mere content producer, and that their individual experience and unique pattern of thinking, as well as their technical expertise, is what makes an artwork valuable. Yes, AI may be modern-day magic, admit critics, but it's the kind of magic that destroys cultural value.
This argument is only half-logical, however. Like the Renaissance and Old Master painters, artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami produce work using scores of assistants. And ever since Marcel Duchamp's seminal work 'Fountain' — a urinal he signed with the mysterious pseudonym 'R. Mutt' and placed in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists salon — artists have created valuable works by recontextualising found objects.
So, who is the Duchamp of the AI age? 'This is new technology, and artists are still discovering its capacities,' said Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London's Serpentine Galleries, which went deep on tech a decade ago when Obrist arrived there and installed the artworld's first institutional CTO. 'TVs were around for a long time before Nam June Paik started making them into art.'
That said, there are already major artists working with AI. Lynn Hershman Leeson has been using nascent AI for a quarter-century in work exploring women's identity. Ian Cheng's 2018 AI-powered piece 'BOB (Bag of Beliefs)' interacted with gallery visitors, displaying a wide range of personalities, before going further. 'One morning at 6am, the Serpentine security called me to say that the video screens had suddenly turned on,' recalled Obrist with glee. 'BOB had decided to open the show early!'
Currently running in Los Angeles at Sprüth Magers gallery, Jon Rafman's solo show 'Proof of Concept' overwhelms visitors with an unending stream of AI content from the fictional Main Stream Media network (MSM),' including videos from the AI popstar Cl0udyH3art, which Rafman created.
In this sense, we see visual artists doing what they always do: engage with new developments in society, birthing new artistic content. But it's hardly the paradigm shift we see in other fields, where AI has led to unicorn companies, mass layoffs and entirely new business models.
In the music world, for example, the most interesting AI-engaged artist is the avant-garde musician Holly Herndon, who in 2019 created Spawn, an AI singer that she wove into her album 'PROTO.' Two years later she released Holly+, a deepfake of her own voice and allowed other musicians to use it, sharing IP rights with Herndon. In 2023, as AI became widely available, Herndon and her partner Matt Dryhurst took things a step further, launching the software startup Spawning to defend fellow creators by allowing them to identify when their art had been used in training AI, so the they could demand their work be removed from the data set — unless they were paid.
The art industry, by contrast, seems unlikely to be disrupted by AI. Per Art Basel and UBS's latest annual report, art is a $57.5 billion market, too small to justify giant AI investments. And given the personality-driven (and often highly irrational) nature of selling and buying art, where the human touch remains essential to justifying high prices, it's hard to imagine AI could play a real role — at least in the upper echelons of the market, which account for the lion's share of financial value and where the few hundred collectors that matter are wooed over lunch, not via algorithmic entreaties.
'Even if Warhol didn't produce every silkscreen with his own hands, collectors believe that each piece was his idea, and that's important,' said Boll. He recalls that a decade ago when German artist Anselm Reyle was among the art world's hottest artists, and thus producing a ton of work, 'a rumour circulated that he had his studio assistants make work 'in his style,' which he then approved after the fact. While this may not have been true, it damaged his market.' 'Sinners' Winners
Made for a mere $90 million and starring Michael B Jordan as identical twins who launch a Mississippi juke joint, the vampire movie 'Sinners' came out surprisingly strong during its mid-April opening weekend, scoring the biggest post-pandemic debut for an original film. But in Hollywood, the big 'Sinners' story was the deal that director Ryan Coogler had struck with Warner Brothers. Leveraging the power that came with helming the hit 'Black Panther' films, the director pushed for a 'first-dollar' deal — meaning that he immediately made money when the film hit theaters, rather than only once the studio recoups its investment. In addition, all financial rights to the film revert to Coogler after 25 years. On the movie's opening day New York Magazine's Vulture site published a widely read piece titled 'Hollywood Execs Fear Ryan Coogler's Sinners Deal 'Could End the Studio System.'' The article anonymously quoted execs who implied that a struggling Warner had broken rank and caved to Coogler, then wrapped up by reporting that 'the Coogler deal has come to be regarded as Hollywood's latest (if not nearly greatest) extinction-level threat.
In response, Coogler said the deal was catalysed by the 'Sinners' plot surrounding Jordan's twin characters' fight to establish a Black-owned club in the Jim Crow South. Getting first-dollar gross plus reversion-rights is rare even among A-listers. But white directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Richard Linklater have struck similar deals in the past, leading many commentators to suggest the furore was ignited as much by the colour of Coogler's skin as by the content of his contract. The good news is that the film had already grossed over $320 million as Arts Radar went live, far more than expected, so by now everyone involved is making money. A Venetian Tragedy
With less than a year to go before its May 2026 opening, the Venice Art Biennial — easily the most important event of its type on the global art stage — is facing unprecedented challenges. Shortly before she was slated to announce the theme of her biennial, Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroon-born art curator who was set to artistic direct the event suddenly died, at age 57, of breast cancer.
Insiders say that she planned to exhibit roughly 65 artists, a fifth as many as her predecessor Adriano Pedrosa, and many of those had already been chosen. The biennale is expected to announce the new director this week. But given the very personal way in which Kouoh planned to work with the artists she had picked, it will be a challenge for whomever steps into her shoes. Running such an important event, in a city where everything must arrive by boat, with a tiny allocated budget is already a tall order without having to use another curator's roster.
There's also a strong political dimension here: Kouoh would have been the first African woman to lead the Venice Biennale (and only the second African, after Okwui Enwezor, who also died in his fifties).
And to make the 2026 biennale run-up thornier still, the closely watched American pavilion is getting sucked into the Trump vortex: The pavilion application, only recently published, says that the US State Department seeks to 'advance international understanding of American values by exposing foreign audiences to innovative and compelling works of art that reflect and promote American values.' Of course, applicants can't have DEI programs in place — easy for most artists, but perhaps much harder for the institutional curator who proposes them. Regardless of who is chosen, they will be working on a radically shorter timeline than any of their predecessors, and the Trump administration has repeatedly suggested defunding the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the pavilion. Will there even be a 2026 US pavilion? Kathleen Ash-Milby, who co-commissioned the American presence in 2024 told Vanity Fair: 'I honestly think it might already be past the point of no return.' What Else I'm Tracking
Pharrell Williams's Auction Platform Joopiter Teamed with Martha Stewart for First Contemporary Art Sale [The Art Newspaper]
Larry David's 'My Dinner With Hitler' Essay Pokes Fun At Bill Maher's White House Meal With Trump [Deadline]
A$AP Rocky Shades Eric Adams, Says He's Going to Run for NYC Mayor: 'I'm Dead Fucking Serious' [Variety]
Reunited Couple Kanye West and Bianca Censori Sue His Dentist for Malpractice, Providing Nitrous Oxide [The Hollywood Reporter]
Having led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, Marc Spiegler now works on a portfolio of cultural-strategy projects. He is President of the Board of Directors of Superblue, works with the Luma Foundation, and serves on the boards of the ArtTech and Art Explora foundations. In addition to consulting for companies such as Prada Group, KEF Audio and Sanlorenzo, Spiegler has long been a Visiting Professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and recently launched the Art Market Minds Academy.