Christie’s is closing its pioneering digital art department as it rethinks its overall sales strategy. Founded in 2022, the department was launched alongside Christie’s 3.0—the house’s blockchain-based platform for NFT sales, which still remains live.
“Christie’s has made a strategic decision to reformat digital art sales,” said an official statement to The Art Newspaper. “The company will continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th- and 21st-century art category.” While Christie’s will keep a New York-based digital art specialist on staff, Web3 news outlet Now Media reported that two members of the department’s three-person team—New York-based Nicole Sale Giles and Sebastian Sanchez—were let go in August.
The house has not commented as to whether its annual Art+Tech Summit in New York, which has run since 2018, will still take place.
While Sotheby’s was the first major house to debut its own on-chain auction platform upon launching Sotheby’s Metaverse in October 2021, Christie’s has driven some of Web3’s greatest art milestones. In 2018, Christie’s catapulted AI artwork into the mainstream when it sold the Paris-based collective Obvious’s GANS inkprint Portrait of Le Comte de Belamy (2018) for $432,500, dwarfing the work’s high estimate of $10,000. And few could forget the March 2021 sale of Beeple’s digital work Everyday: The First 5000 Days (2021), which hammered at $69.3m (the house applied no estimate) and put NFTs on the art world map.
Since then, Christie’s has legitimised the practices of a number of NFT artists across Christie’s 3.0 and the house’s regular sales, featuring works by leading digital creatives like the AI poet Sasha Stiles, the abstractionist Tyler Hobbs, and the Ethiopian photography collective Yatreda. NFTs have reached collectors around the world, and entered institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
“When Christie’s auctioned my work Portraits of a Mind it was the first NFT and blockchain based work sold at a major auction house,” says British artist Robert Alice, who had a Christie’s 3.0 sale in March 2024. “It took a huge leap of faith. Christie’s in this respect were pioneers.”
Although the auction house has remained tight-lipped as to the reasoning behind this week’s closure, market contractions across NFTs and the wider art world loom large. Since launching in 2022, none of the 11 auctions Christie’s 3.0 has hosted—offering about 17 lots on average—has ever broken past $400,000 in sales, even with steadily rising Ethereum prices. This February’s Augmented Intelligence auction of AI artworks by the likes of Refik Anadol and duo Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst sparked controversy, and failed to rake in seven figures.
While some digital and NFT artists have taken to X to mourn the loss of Christie’s precedent-setting department, many remain optimistic, counting the news as a sign that digital art is graduating from a novelty to a movement—and getting savvier regarding where it belongs.
“While auction houses were great early legitimisers, the traditional model is not naturally aligned with new more decentralised web3 models,” remarks Alice. “In some sense, this is a good thing. The goal is to build new institutions, and web3 has been remarkably resilient to larger brands and platforms. In many ways, this news shows the strength of new infrastructure and models being built today, and where digital art collectors want to be.”
