Aug 19, 2025

Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker, currently in Boston on the first leg of my late-summer holiday art tour of New England. Next stop, Portland. Please send along any recommendations—though, I admit, Mrs. Wallpower handles much of the dining leg of the tour and has impeccable taste.

Today’s issue is shorter than usual, but hopefully no less satisfying. Earlier this week, I chatted with my newest colleague, Ian Krietzberg, who covers artificial intelligence for Puck. (Sign up for The Hidden Layer, his private email, by clicking here.) Our conversation, about the rise of A.I. in art and the potential loss to human creativity, is below. Plus, Julie Davich is here with a final update from Monterey Car Week, where two cars sold for more than $25 million, but total sales didn’t quite live up to expectations.

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Julie Brener Davich

Mixed results in Monterey…: Monterey Car Week ended with neither a whimper nor a bang—unless you count the surprising $26 million Ferrari Daytona SP3 at RM Sotheby’s, the most expensive lot of the week and an auction record for a new car. (It was estimated at just $3.5 million, but was auctioned to benefit the Ferrari Foundation, which recently helped rebuild a school that was destroyed in the Altadena fires.) The sales at the three biggest auctioneers—RM Sotheby’s, Gooding Christie’s, and Broad Arrow—totaled $353 million, a slight uptick from last year’s $340 million, but well below the estimated $423 million.

RM Sotheby’s sold 138 of its 159 lots, or 87 percent, for $168 million, a smidge above its presale estimate of $162.7 million. But that’s including the charity SP3—when you remove that from the total, the number sours a bit. In line with current market trends, the top four cars in the sale were all newer Italian supercars. A yellow (or “Giallo Modena”) 1995 Ferrari F50, once owned by Ralph Lauren and expected to make $6.5 million, sold for a record $9.2 million. A red 1993 Ferrari F40 LM by Michelotto, the 14th of only 19 built and estimated to bring $8.5 million, sold for a record $11 million.

This year marked Gooding Christie’s first outing at Monterey under its new co-branding. They sold just 83 percent of the 182 lots offered for a total of $127.9 million—well below the $169 million estimate, but higher than the $109 million that Gooding achieved last year. Eschewing trendier offerings, their five most expensive lots were all classic cars from the 1950s to the 1970s. The top lots either fell short of or just reached their estimates, even with fees included. After their $25.3 million Ferrari 250 GT, which I wrote about in Sunday’s newsletter, the second-highest-priced lot was a 1973 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Competizione Series III that brought $8.1 million, right in line with the estimate.

Broad Arrow’s sale was also disappointing, totaling just $57.4 million—again well below its $91 million estimate, as well as the $71.5 million they achieved last year. Their sell-through rate was only 80 percent, down from 85 percent last year, with an average lot value of $463,000; the top lot was a 2005 Maserati MC12 Stradale for $5.2 million.

Though Bonhams’ $44.7 million sale total was lower than Broad Arrow’s, they arguably performed better, squeaking past their $42 million estimate (albeit with fees) and hitting a 96 percent sell-through rate. Their average lot value was also higher, at $518,000. The house set a record with a 2020 Bugatti Divo that sold for $8.6 million against an estimate of $7 million, followed by two more Bugattis: a 2023 Chiron Super Sport that brought in $4.46 million, and a 2021 Chiron Pur Sport that achieved $4 million.

Of course, Monterey Car Week is also about spotlighting future auction offerings. The talk of the week was a white 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO—one of only 36 GTOs produced by Ferrari, and the only one in white—that Mecum Auctions is selling in Florida in January. Some are saying it could make as much as $70 million.

And now, the main event…

Putting the Art in Artificial

Why is Silicon Valley seemingly so excited about replacing human artistry? A frank conversation about Big Tech’s art “disruption” fantasies, and where that leaves creatives and enthusiasts.

Marion Maneker

It’s been nearly seven years since Christie’s first sold a portrait produced by A.I. at auction, achieving more than 60 times the work’s $7,000 estimate and bringing in more money than an Andy Warhol print and a Roy Lichtenstein bronze work offered in the same sale. At the time, the house declared itself “the first auction house to offer an artwork created by an algorithm,” and wondered whether A.I. was “set to become art’s next medium.” Since then, they’ve continued to test the market—just a few months ago, they dedicated an entire auction to A.I.-generated art, and well surpassed their estimates to bring in more than $700,000.

The adoption of A.I. is accelerating across nearly every creative industry. But it’s worth asking: Why should A.I. be doing anything creative in the first place? After all, generative A.I. is effectively statistics, and statistics can be seen as the opposite of creativity. And yet, as my colleague Ian Krietzberg points out, art might be especially vulnerable to disruption—the technology may have a tendency to “hallucinate,” but that’s hardly an impediment in this field.

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Earlier this week, we discussed what gets lost when A.I. attempts to create art, the trade-off between speed and quality, where the technology might actually help the creative process, and much more. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

“It Doesn’t Matter if It’s Good”

Marion Maneker: Why is it that people involved in A.I., and in Silicon Valley more broadly, have this passion for eliminating originality or artistry, the human creator? I’m not opposed to A.I. in any way, but what I don’t understand is why it would be applied to art. Is it marketing? Is it for proof of how powerful it could be? Where does all this come from?

Ian Krietzberg: You’re right on the money there. It’s kind of a mix between marketing and proof of capability. The funny reality is that so many prominent folks in this industry will always talk about the holy grails of the pursuit of this technology, which is like, Cure cancer, solve climate change. It’s ironic to me because very little of what they’re doing is actually pursuing that. What’s turned out to be the case is that, when you’re dealing with these generative systems, the easiest way to show you’ve mastered some form of capability is in the arts.

These systems aren’t reliable. They have all these caveats, questions, and concerns around them. What they can easily prove is, you ask ChatGPT to write you a book, it’ll write you a book. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. They’re able to prove a very generic capability that gives the impression of general application. Art is a place where the mess-ups, the hallucinations, and reliability don’t really matter.

There has been an enormous growth of bullshit over the last 20 years with the amplification of these platforms, and now we’ve invented a technology that generates bullshit at higher rates.

Because of the environment we’re in, where attention spans are shorter and the key is more content, what the owners of studios and media companies want is more content, faster, and cheaper. Those are the three things that I keep hearing: more, faster, cheaper. No one is talking about better; no one is talking about more artistic.

And I’m not sure what that gets you, except confusion and a rising tide of stuff that your customers have to wade through and feel beleaguered by.

The thinking from some of these places is, If we can just fill a pool with stuff for people to swim in, maybe they won’t get out of the pool. The money is no longer in a single TV show—it’s in keeping people subscribed to the platform. And how do you keep people subscribed to the platform? More stuff, all the time. That’s how the game has shifted. I don’t think that’s necessarily the right approach. I feel like I’ve been hearing from everyone for years that there’s just too much stuff. For a while, there was too much good stuff. Now, there’s just too much shit.

Bruce Forever

In a previous interview, you were talking about your interest in authentic art. Talk to me a little bit about your sense of authenticity versus A.I. as the technology expands.

Everyone loves Bruce Springsteen. If you listen to a Bruce song, it’s not intensely complicated. When he sings, it may not be the perfect pitch or the most technically correct, but the grit in his voice feels very emotive to me. If you sing about something painful, which he often does, you really feel that. That’s what’s lacking to me.

Art isn’t about perfection or being technically correct. There are so many musicians who know very little about music. John Mayer can’t read music, but he has a feel for it—he’s fluent in the language of the guitar. Not everyone is Billy Joel when it comes to technical capability, but they’re communicating something about themselves in a raw, impassioned way. And that’s the element you can’t find in a synthetic machine.

I think there’s one aspect of the whole entertainment complex that is the opposite of A.I., and that’s sports. The connection between sports and the authenticity of art is that it’s human-based and has an unknown, unpredictable outcome. I feel that with art, music, and, to some extent, storytelling writ large, there’s still the opportunity for very talented people with original ideas to do things that will attract attention and move the ball forward.

I think for a lot of sectors, media included, what’s happening here presents a massive opportunity. What we’re likely to see with generative A.I. as it gets adopted and pushed everywhere is that it’s just an averaging down of everything—an averaging down of thought, creativity, and consumption. And average isn’t interesting. So if everything gets pushed to this bare line that’s tailored based on your cookies and preferences and such, that creates quite a significant opportunity for weirdness.

The industry’s go-to source for unflinching reporting on the trillion-dollar business of artificial intelligence - perhaps the single most important technology of our time. Ian Krietzberg, the powerhouse journalist behind The Deep View, delivers twice-weekly insights into the latest dealmaking and breakthroughs in A.I., and how the intersecting worlds of finance, entertainment, media, and politics are being transformed in its wake.

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