Current trends on the art market and in the industry

If you take a look at the current art market, you will notice that painting in particular is experiencing a renaissance. Until not so long ago, it was considered a dying art, but today it is once again on everyone’s lips. Especially commissioned art, which is often based on the idea of “having the perfect picture painted”, is flourishing. As everywhere in modern times, just think of social media, the algorithm does not stop at art and thus painting. In 2018, Christie’s auction house in New York sold a painting for the first time that was not painted by a young, performing artist, but was created entirely using artificial intelligence (AI for short). Instead of the obligatory artist’s signature, the signature of the algorithm can be found at the bottom left. The code can be traced back to the underlying technology GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) by computer scientist Ian Goodfellow. The idea of “Artistic Intelligence” is older. In 2016, a project called “The Next Rembrandt” used computer scans of Rembrandt artwork to create a painting bearing the artist’s exact signature. The idea of having others paint for him already existed during Rembrandt’s lifetime. At that time, in the so-called Rembrandt School, numerous painters tried to adopt the style of the great artist. Nowadays, this often makes it incredibly difficult to distinguish the original from a copy. Let’s think about the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe: having a portrait painted from a photograph was not very popular at the time, but it made Andy Warhol world famous. He argued that the creation of art should be left more and more to machines. His famous studio “The Factory” was not only a hotspot of the art scene at the time, but also the workplace of numerous employees who were tasked with printing art. With all the euphoria about artificial, or in this case artistic, intelligence, the question of the creator remains. Copyright is incredibly significant in art. Artists are allowed to proudly call the works they produce their intellectual property. Whether computer code deserves the same reverence has yet to be determined. Many art enthusiasts today have exact desired paintings in their heads, which makes the search for the perfect work of art difficult.

Commissioned art provides a remedy here. If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the art market, you can simply have the picture you want painted. Also photographers who have succeeded in a special snapshot can have the photo painted. Let paint pictures according to template is currently popular as never before. But how exactly does it work, this “let paint picture from photo”? Basically, the customer owning the rights to the photo can have all conceivable sizes and types of the image painted on canvas. At will, he can first commission a digital drawing of the image and then have the photo painted. The price depends on the degree of difficulty, the material and the size in which the customer wants to have the picture painted from the photo. Depending on the medium, the pictures are delivered after about four weeks rolled and not yet stretched on frames.

Critics might interject at this point, a picture from the photo paint or generally let paint pictures from template is not original enough. But beauty is known to be in the eye of the beholder and anyway it is so that the artistic taste of the individual is at least as individual as a work of art. At this point, however, we must again refer to Andy Warhol, who coined the idea of “having a portrait painted from a photograph” like no other. Having the picture painted on canvas as well as having a picture painted from a photo is a trend that will certainly accompany us into the future. Artificial intelligence, and therefore artistic intelligence, allows us to make art according to our exact imagination, setting a new standard.