Reports suggest that just a few years after the NFT boom, Christie’s plans to close its digital art department.
The news was first reported by Now Media on Monday, suggesting that the digital art department at the auction house is closing. While not officially confirmed, the major indication came in the form of the departure of Nicole Sales Giles, vice president of digital at Christie’s. Sales-Giles confirmed her departure, while no replacement for her has been announced. Furthermore, a Christie’s spokesperson said that the auction house has made “a strategic decision to reformat digital art sales.”
It was not long ago that Christie’s hosted its first NFT sale in 2021. There, Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021) sold for a whopping $69.3 million, thus setting the stage for the NFT craze. But the craze fizzled before it could even properly pop. 2021 made it seem like NFTs would be the next big thing in the art world. In 2022, Christie’s made only $5.9 million from NFT sales – merely 4 percent of what it earned in the previous year. Over the next few years, NFT sales kept dropping until even hosting NFT auctions became unviable. It was reported that by 2024, 95 percent of the NFT artworks sold were essentially ‘defunct’ and incurred losses for their owners.
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As such, it is no surprise that Christie’s is eliminating the digital arts department and absorbing the remnants under its broader 20th and 21st Century Contemporary Art departments. Sotheby’s did something similar last year when it fired most of the staff from its Metaverse and NFT divisions, leaving only a handful of employees.
