Edmond de Belamy

Edmond de Belamy
Artist	Obvious (collective)
Year	c. 2018
Medium	Ink print
Subject	Male portrait
Dimensions	70 cm × 70 cm (27.5 in × 27.5 in)
Location	Christie’s auction house, New York City

Edmond de Belamy, sometimes referred to as Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, is a generative adversarial network (GAN) portrait painting constructed in 2018 by Paris-based arts collective Obvious.^[1] Printed on canvas, the work belongs to a series of generative images called La Famille de Belamy. The name Belamy is a tribute to Ian Goodfellow, inventor of GANs. In French, "bel ami" means "good friend", a translated pun on Goodfellow.^[2]

Auction

It gained media attention after Christie's announced its intention to auction the piece as the first artwork created using artificial intelligence to be featured in a Christie's Images New York auction. The picture was originally hung on the wall to the right of a bronze work by Roy Lichtenstein.^[3]

Six minutes into bidding, it went up to US$350,000.^[4] After the bidding, it surpassed pre-auction estimates, which valued it at US$7,000 to US$10,000; it sold for US$432,500 on 25 October 2018 instead,^[5][6] making it the second most expensive artwork in the auction, just cheaper than Andy Warhol’s artwork, the 254 cm × 254 cm 1981 artwork that was sold for US$780,500, Myths.^[4][7]

Method

Obvious's members are Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier. Caselles-Dupré stated that the algorithm used a "discriminator".^[4] Hugo Caselles-Dupré found artist Robbie Barrat’s open source algorithm that was forked from Soumith Chintala on Github.^[8] He then used the algorithm to be trained on a set of 15,000 portraits from the online art encyclopedia WikiArt, spanning the 14th to the 19th centuries.^[9]

It is manually signed at the bottom-right with ${\displaystyle \min _{\mathcal {G}}\max _{\mathcal {D}}E_{x}\left[\log({\mathcal {D}}(x))\right]+E_{z}\left[\log(1-{\mathcal {D}}({\mathcal {G}}(z)))\right]}$, which is part of the algorithm code that produced it.^[10]

Description

The piece is a portrait of a somewhat blurry man. It is printed on canvas by Obvious; the print measures 27 1⁄2 × 27 1⁄2 in (70 cm × 70 cm) and is set within a gold-colored gilded wood frame.

The work belongs to a series of eleven generative images called La Famille de Belamy (from French, lit. 'Belamy's family') that was meant to resemble Belamy's family tree.^[11] Edmond de Belamy is the fictional descendant of Madame de Belamy, a name that was given to another artificial intelligence (AI) artwork made by Obvious.^[12] The painting is not supposed to be a depiction of any real person.^[13]

Reception

The piece has been criticized because it was created using a generative adversarial network (GAN) software package that was implemented by Robbie Barrat, an AI artist who was not affiliated with Obvious. Caselles-Dupré admits that Obvious used the code from Barrat, but he says that they tweaked it. Posts on the project's issue tracker show Obvious members requesting that Barrat provide support and custom features. Mario Klingemann wrote that "You could argue that probably 90 percent of the actual 'work' was done by [Barrat]."^[2]

The piece has also been criticized for whether it is real "art" or not.^[14] Art critic Jonathan Jones did not acknowledge Edmond de Belamy as art.^[15]

In an interview with Jason Bailey, Caselles-Dupré said: "We are in the middle of a storm and lots of false information is released with our name on it. In fact, we are really depressed about it." The "false information" that he was pointing to was that the painting was the first portrait that was generated by AI.^[16]

The piece has been placed within a tradition of works calling into question the basis of the modern art market.^[17] Research has used Edmond de Belamy to show how anthropomorphizing AI can affect allocations of responsibility and credit to artists.^[18][19]

References