When Algorithms Meet the Old Masters: Arte’s Brilliant Documentary on AI Storming the Art World

Arte, the elegant Franco-German cultural channel born in 1992 from a bold political dream to knit Europe together through television, has always had a soft spot for intelligent, beautifully crafted documentaries. With its bilingual soul and a mandate to broadcast the finest European film, music, theatre and – crucially – visual arts, it remains one of the last bastions of slow, thoughtful programming in a TikTok age. Their offering, Wie die KI den Kunstmarkt aufmischt (How AI is Shaking Up the Art Market, available on YouTube with English subtitles), directed by Frédéric Biamonti, is a perfect example: a stylish and slightly anxious 52-minute ride through a world where connoisseurs in cashmere scarves suddenly find themselves competing with algorithms in hoodies.

The film opens with the hushed, incense-scented universe of traditional expertise – think dimly lit Parisian cabinets and 16,000 cardboard boxes stuffed with half a million handwritten index cards – and then gleefully detonates it with the arrival of artificial intelligence. Biamonti has an eye for delicious contrasts: we cut a legendary Paris expert who can smell a Murillo at twenty paces, to a Zurich start-up office where a former physicist feeds high-resolution scans of Rubens into a neural network faster than you can say “craquelure”.

The documentary follows three main fault lines.

First, the digitisation of the market itself. Artprice, the French database giant, has turned what used to be a clubby, opaque trade into a real-time global bazaar. Auction houses such as Drouot now look like television studios; more than 60 % of bids come through apps while collectors sip coffee on the Tokyo subway. One delightful sequence shows a rather monstrous Ribera – “a guy with sailing ears and a lopsided grin” – selling for €2 million during lockdown to a buyer who never laid eyes on it. The hammer falls; the world tilts.

Second, AI authentication. Enter Art Recognition, the Swiss start-up that wants to replace the “golden gut” of the expert with cold, hard pattern recognition. Their algorithm, trained on thousands of authentic works and deliberate fakes, correctly dismisses a putative Rubens Crucifixion that had fooled lesser mortals (and agrees, gratifyingly, with the human superstar Professor Nils Büttner). Yet when the same system declares a mysterious American “Raphael Madonna” genuine – against the unanimous scepticism of flesh-and-blood scholars – the battle lines are drawn. The owners’ frustration is palpable: “Their immense knowledge is matched only by their arrogance.” One suspects the algorithm felt the same.

Third, the darker arts. Perfect 3D-printed “Litoclones” of Monet waterlilies already hang in museum shops (curators spend weeks arguing over the exact mauve of twilight). Generative AI can spit out a convincing Rubens portrait in minutes. The film ends on a chilling note: tomorrow’s master forgers may not need paintbrushes at all – just a good printer and a malicious prompt.

Yet Biamonti refuses to choose sides. He gives us the romance of the old guard – the expert caressing a Fragonard sketch as though it were alive – and the dizzying promise of the new: the Rijksmuseum’s AI restoring the amputated strips of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, revealing that the master had slyly placed his own eye at the exact geometric centre of the composition. There is even a playful tool that points a phone at any object and instantly finds visual cousins across two million museum pieces – a kind of Shazam for the history of art.

Traditional experts eye the algorithms like aristocrats watching the arrival of the …