A surrealist painting from the 1940s by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) - shattering the auction record for an artwork by a female artist. The painting went for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, according to the Sotheby's auction house. The auction also broke the previous record for the highest amount paid for a Kahlo portrait, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021. The work - titled El sueño (la cama), which is translated to The dream (The bed) - depicts Kahlo asleep in a canopy bed beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite. It marks one of the Mexican artist's most psychologically charged self portraits, Sotheby's said, and was painted during a turbulent chapter in Kahlo's life - the year her former lover was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.

Like many nascent artistic movements, generative AI art has been widely criticized. But some artists are nevertheless pushing the creative limits of these new tools. In this era of AI slop, the idea that generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway could be used to make art can seem absurd: What possible artistic value is there to be found in the likes of Shrimp Jesus and Ballerina Cappuccina? But amid all the muck, there are people using AI tools with real consideration and intent. Some of them are finding notable success as AI artists: They are gaining huge online followings, selling their work at auction, and even having it exhibited in galleries and museums. "Sometimes you need a camera, sometimes AI, and sometimes paint or pencil or any other medium," says Jacob Adler, a musician and composer who won the top prize at the generative video company Runway's third annual AI Film Festival for his work Total Pixel Space "It's just one tool that is added to the creator's toolbox."

A collection of sci-fi movie memorabilia is heading to auction and includes one of the most iconic film aliens of all time. As part of the upcoming series, "There Are Such Things: 20th Century Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy on Screen," Sotheby's is offering an original, screen-used E.T. full body model seen in Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Designed by the late, great special effects and makeup artist Carlo Rambaldi, the roughly 3-foot-tall piece of pop culture history was used in the famous "closet scene," and is one of just three manufactured during the making of the 1982 movie. While instantly recognizable today, E.T.'s overall look was completely absent from Melissa Mathison's screenplay. Creating the character from scratch came through a collaboration between Spielberg, storyboard artist Ed Verreaux, and Rambaldi.

Some of 2024's most interesting science, technology, and history stories could be found in international auctions. Regardless of their final winning bids, each of the following items and artifacts are impressive in their own right. From AI-painted artwork to hunks of coal, these auction items highlight the wide range of not just artifacts from the past, but future-forward items, as well. If nearly 45 million sounds like a lot for a dinosaur skeleton to you, you aren't alone. Although billed as one of the "finest" known examples, a stegosaurus named "Apex" almost immediately drew controversy over the summer for a final bid that came in at over 10 times Sotheby's initial estimation.

These images were created by an artist known as Botto, which exhibited at Sotheby's in New York this October and has made more than 4 million from sales of its work. In truth though, Botto needs only GPUs to get creative juices flowing. Botto is a decentralized semi-autonomous artistic agent created in 2021 by the German artist Mario Klingemann; Simon Hudson, a media entrepreneur; and Ziv Epstein, a computer scientist and designer. Botto contains an AI image generator similar to Dall-E or Midjourney but its output is also shaped by a "taste model" that selects the most pleasing images generated by a prompt. The taste model is tuned to reflect the preferences of a community of Botto enthusiasts who vote on the images Botto produces and posts online here.

A man tries the "Metaverse" via VR technology at the Mobile World Congress MWC in Barcelona, Spain, ... [ ] March 1, 2022. The 2022 edition of the MWC opened its doors on Monday, for a four-day event that is expected to host between 40,000 and 60,000 people. Flashback to the beginning of 2021 and most people hadn't heard of the term "metaverse." Today, the "metaverse" has found a home in everyday conversation--so much so that it has been called the "buzziest of buzz words." Although the term has only recently entered the popular lexicon, it was coined about three decades ago by Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel, Snow Crash, which portrays a next-generation internet powered by virtual reality.

Collectors have long enlisted dealers or auction houses to help resell their art holdings because such insiders typically have up-to-date pricing data and access to potential buyers. Now, in the latest challenge to the art world's status quo, a team led by former Sotheby's rainmaker Adam Chinn plans to launch a peer-to-peer digital marketplace later this month that will invite collectors to sell high-end art to each other, directly and anonymously. Listings in an early version of the site, called LiveArt Market, include an Andy Warhol "Rorschach" from 1984 valued around $200,000 and Jack Pierson's 2009 sign, "Glory," valued around $85,000. The move comes as all sorts of art-world players rethink the traditional ways art gets traded online, from former Christie's auctioneer Loïc Gouzer's Fair Warning auction app to the proliferation of digital platforms selling NFT artworks. Even as the art world's attention increasingly pivots back to in-person art events including fairs, online sales of luxury goods remain robust and some top industry dealmakers see a bigger market opportunity in finding fresh ways to sell art to collectors accustomed to shopping for art online.

Two paintings up for auction in New York highlight a growing interest in artificial intelligence-created works -- a technique that could transform how art is made and viewed but is also stirring up passionate debate. The art world was stunned last year when an AI painting sold for $432,500, and auctioneers are keen to further test demand for computer-generated works. "Art is a true reflection of what our society, what our environment responds to," said Max Moore of Sotheby's. "And so it's just a natural continuation of the progression of art," he added. Sotheby's will put two paintings by the French art collective Obvious up for sale on Thursday, including "Le Baron De Belamy."

NEW YORK: Two paintings up for auction in New York highlight a growing interest in artificial intelligence-created works - a technique that could transform how art is made and viewed but is also stirring up passionate debate. The art world was stunned last year when an AI painting sold for $432,500, and auctioneers are keen to further test demand for computer-generated works. "Art is a true reflection of what our society, what our environment responds to," said Max Moore of Sotheby's. "And so it's just a natural continuation of the progression of art," he added. Sotheby's will put two paintings by the French art collective Obvious up for sale on Thursday, including'Le Baron De Belamy'.

AI has moved into the art world. Two paintings up for auction in New York highlight a growing interest in artificial intelligence-created works – a technique that could transform how art is made and viewed but is also stirring up passionate debate. Last year, the art world was stunned when an AI painting sold for US$432,500, and auctioneers are keen to further test demand for computer-generated works. "Art is a true reflection of what our society, what our environment responds to," said Max Moore of Sotheby's. Sotheby's will put two paintings by the French art collective Obvious up for sale this week, including "Le Baron De Belamy."