In March this year, Christie’s auction house made history with its sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days. The NFT based artwork fetched a record-breaking $69 million. It may have been a surprising move by the historic art selling institution, founded in 1766, but it’s not the only auction house to take an interest in the avant-garde world of crypto art and NFTs. 

Christie’s Goes Crypto

Christie’s landmark sale of Beeple’s NFT work was the first time a purely digital artwork has gone to auction at a major auction house. The blockchain-based digital collage featured 5,000 images that American artist Beeple had posted online each day since 2007. It sold as a JPEG image file embedded with a non-fungible token, or NFT. This distinguished it from previous sales of digital artworks by the auction house, which had always been accompanied by something in physical form. Christie’s writes on their website that “this unique online sale is an important milestone in the development of the market for digital art.” 

Last October, Christie’s was also responsible for the sale of the first NFT by a major auction house. The piece in question was Robert Alice’s Block 21. Its circular panel is a concentrated mass of digits that represent Bitcoin’s original code, accompanied by an NFT. The artwork sold for $131,250, fetching more than seven times its estimated price. 

NFTs at Sotheby’s

Other major auction houses are also making forays into the continuously evolving world of NFTs. In April, Sotheby’s held a three-day NFT auction of works by digital artist Pak. As well as the form of the artwork being a novelty for the auction house — it was the first NFT sale for Sotheby’s — the process of selling was also new. Sotheby’s permitted collectors to purchase “cubes” worth $500 dollars each via the Nifty Gateway platform, which partnered with the auction house for the sale. The cubes could then be cashed in for NFTs. On the first day of the auction, Sotheby’s sold nearly $10 million worth of cubes in the first 15 minutes. The final total of the auction was $16.8 million. 

On June 10, Sotheby’s concluded “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”, co-organized by artist Robert Alice. The sale featured NFTs by 27 different artists. Included in the auction was Quantum by Kevin McCoy. The work is a geometric animation which the auction house claims is the first known NFT, created in May 2014. Another item on sale was an Alien CryptoPunk NFT titled “CryptoPunk #7523”. CryptoPunks are 10,000 uniquely generated characters created by Larva Labs in 2017. The one offered by Sotheby’s is particularly rare as it is one of only nine of the alien variety of CryptoPunks. 

Auction house Phillips also jumped on the NFT bandwagon recently by selling an NFT by Canadian artist Mad Dog Jones. Titled Replicator, the artwork’s quirk is that it will now generate new artworks, each of which will have a set number of NFTs. By the end, there will be seven generations of NFTs, which work out at between 75 and 300 digital objects created in roughly a year.

Bonhams auction house is also delving into crypto. Its online sale of crypto artworks, in collaboration with digital art marketplace SuperRare, will end on June 30. The auction house said the sale features early crypto pioneers who experimented with NFTs before it became a global phenomenon.

Auction Houses Go Virtual

With traditional auction houses getting on board with crypto art, interest in collecting digital art has found a wider audience. Where Sotheby’s April auction saw mainly crypto-native buyers, the market is beginning to expand. Michael Bouhanna, contemporary art specialist at the auction house, said, “I’ve seen some crossover with our collector base, very active in contemporary art, who are very intrigued and wanted to learn more.” 

Perhaps the most radical digital art novelty, however, is Sotheby’s virtual reality gallery. The auction house has created a digital duplicate of its London headquarters. This will be accessible in Decentraland, a decentralized virtual reality world powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Within the virtual gallery, there will be five ground-floor exhibition spaces for digital artworks. There will even be an avatar of the auction house’s London commissionair Hans Lomulder to welcome visitors to the gallery.

“We see spaces like Decentraland as the next frontier for digital art where artists, collectors and viewers alike can engage with one another from anywhere in the world and showcase art that is fundamentally scarce and unique, but accessible to anyone for viewing,” said Bouhanna.