The News
A Swiss auction house has become the first to sell a piece of artwork authenticated solely by artificial intelligence, ARTnews reported. Russian artist Marianne von Werefkin’s unnamed watercolor sold for $17,000 last week, almost double its high estimate.
Germann Auction House partnered with Swiss AI company Art Recognition for the authentication. The AI looks at minute details of each piece, including the brushstrokes, proportions, and color variations. Art Recognition claims its algorithm can authenticate pieces that it has never seen before based on these features in other works by the same artist.
Estimates vary for how widespread counterfeit art is, though experts agree fakes represent a significant market share. In 2018, a French art museum discovered that 82 of its 140 paintings attributed to landscape artist Étienne Terrus were fake.
Within the last year, an Italian art theft group has rounded up 2,100 forgeries claiming to be b artists including Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Banksy — many of which were sold through auction houses.