Christie’s Helped Drive the Art World’s NFT Craze. Now, the Auction House Is Shutting Down Its Digital Art Division
Once a booming sector, the nonfungible token art market has been contracting for years
:focal(2971x1980:2972x1981)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d1/e6/d1e616b8-8630-4620-addd-544d6d251ee9/nft.png)
Christie’s is shutting down its digital art division—a significant pivot for the auction house, which helped ignite the art world’s nonfungible token (NFT) craze four years ago.
“Christie’s has made a strategic decision to reformat digital art sales,” a spokesperson tells Now Media’s Matt Medved. “The company will continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th- and 21st-century art category.”
Two digital art staffers were let go as part of the shake-up, which comes under the leadership of Christie’s new CEO, Bonnie Brennan, who was appointed in February. A digital art specialist will stay on staff at Christie’s, Now Media reports.
The news comes four years after Christie’s sold its first NFT, a digital certificate that lives on a blockchain, “a digital record of transactions distributed across a decentralized network of computers,” in the words of Marina Isgro, a curator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and proves ownership over a work of digital art. As Isgro explained during a 2021 online panel, an NFT is “a unique piece of data registered on a blockchain that can serve as a surrogate or certificate of authenticity for various kinds of objects in the digital and real worlds.”
Fun fact: The most valuable living artists
- The sale of Everydays: The First 5,000 Days in March 2021 marked the third-highest auction price then achieved by a living artist, placing Beeple (the name used by artist Mike Winkelmann) after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
In 2021, Christie’s facilitated the sale of the NFT associated with Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, a digital artwork by the artist known as Beeple. Going under the hammer for $69.3 million, Everydays is still the most expensive NFT ever sold.
The sale helped kick off an NFT fad in the art world that lasted roughly a year. Christie’s went on to invest in the space further, launching its own NFT auction platform.
But the digital art gold rush was short-lived. Between 2021 and 2022, Christie’s reported a 96 percent decline in NFT sales, as M.K. Manoylov reported for the Block in 2022. More recently, a 2024 report from NFTevening found that 96 percent of NFTs are effectively “dead,” or not valuable.
The shuttering of Christie’s digital art division comes two years after Sotheby’s, another renowned auction house, laid off numerous employees in its NFT division, as ARTnews’ Shanti Escalante-De Mattei and Angelica Villa reported in 2023.
Weighing in on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, digital art adviser Fanny Lakoubay says Christie’s decision is “probably tied to the current art market contraction.”
“Auction houses can’t justify a whole department when it brings in less revenue than the others (even with some recent successful sales),” Lakoubay adds.
Earlier this year, the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report found that sales in the international art market overall declined by 12 percent in 2024. “Decline in value was driven by cooling at the top end,” the report stated, describing 2024 as “a year of continuing geopolitical tensions, economic volatility and trade fragmentation.”
The Christie’s news is “definitely not a great public signal,” Lakoubay writes. “But we should also remember: Auction houses only focus on secondary sales of already well-known artists and brands. It’s still too early for that model to really work/scale with digital art.”
Christie’s is not pulling away from digital tender entirely. Earlier this year, the auction house debuted a crypto real estate division, which allows buyers to purchase properties with digital currencies.