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.

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.

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."

Mario Klingemann, a German artist who uses AI in his work, has radical views on creativity. "Humans are not original," he says. "We only reinvent, make connections between things we have seen." While humans can only build on what we have learned and what others have done before us, "machines can create from scratch". Setting aside whether or not human creativity is limited and indeed what precisely creativity is, it's certainly true that artificial neural networks being developed today work out the rules as they go along, rather than being taught.

"I guess I have to thank everyone who plays computer games," Klingemann says. "Thanks to the high demands of games, graphics cards have become extremely powerful and versatile." He likens the power consumption of the system to the energy needed to run a fridge. That said, the real-time aspect and the high resolution took "quite some time" to perfect, according to the artist. All in all, he says, he spent about three months training the models, writing the code, and designing the installation.