The AI Provenance Crisis
AI-generated art is entering the auction market without disclosure, exposing $60B in market infrastructure to a trust failure it has no tools to manage.
AI-generated art is entering the auction market without disclosure, exposing $60B in market infrastructure to a trust failure it has no tools to manage.
Physical galleries in secondary markets are closing at the fastest rate since 2009 as artists go direct-to-collector — and the intermediary layer that controlled art pricing for a century is under structural pressure.
For two centuries, Western museums presented themselves as stewards of humanity's heritage. The reckoning now underway reveals how selective that humanity always was.
Germany returned 1,000 Benin Bronzes. France repatriated colonial-era objects. Now indigenous communities in the US are winning cases that Western museums said were impossible. The signal suggests this is just beginning.
AI image generation has disrupted the economic and aesthetic foundations of visual art. The philosophical questions it raises have not been resolved — and probably cannot be.