Christie’s has ended their romance with NFTs and Digital Art by closing their dedicated digital art department, a unit set up in 2022 with great fanfare at the height of the NFT boom. The move, described as a “strategic reformatting,” signals a recalibration of how the auction house intends to handle digital works in the future. Sales will continue, but folded into the broader twentieth- and twenty-first-century categories. Christie’s blockchain sales platform, Christie’s 3.0, remains operational.
The shake-up comes with staffing changes. Vice president and head of digital art sales, Nicole Sale Giles, departed the New York–based team in August, while sales manager Sebastian Sanchez will remain as a specialist within the restructured framework. The position of digital art coordinator Anna Roszak has yet to be clarified. The decision leaves questions about Christie’s annual Art+Tech Summit, a flagship event launched in 2018. Its July edition went ahead as planned, but the auction house has declined to confirm whether the summit will continue.
Christie’s has played a high-profile role in legitimising digital practice within the art market. In 2018, it startled the industry by selling Obvious’s AI-generated portrait Le Comte de Belamy for $432,500—forty times its estimate. Then, in 2021, Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days* sold for $69.3 million, propelling NFTs into headlines and drawing a new cohort of collectors. Christie’s 3.0 subsequently hosted auctions with artists including Tyler Hobbs, Sasha Stiles, and the Ethiopian collective Yatreda, while museums such as MoMA acquired key NFT (Digital Editions) works.
British artist Robert Alice, whose Portraits of a Mind became the first blockchain-based work to be auctioned by a major house, described Christie’s role as “pioneering.” He credits the company with having taken an early leap of faith at a moment when digital art was far from accepted.
Yet despite these milestones, the commercial returns of Christie’s digital arm have been modest. Since its launch, the platform has held eleven auctions, averaging just seventeen lots apiece, none surpassing $400,000 in total sales. Even this year’s Augmented Intelligence sale, which featured high-profile names such as Refik Anadol and Holly Herndon, fell short of expectations and provoked debate about the value of AI-driven art.
The downturn reflects wider market realities. The NFT sector has endured a steep contraction since its 2021 peak, with speculative buyers retreating and Ethereum prices failing to buoy sales figures. In this context, Christie’s retreat is unsurprising: what once appeared to be the future of the art market now demands rethinking.
Reaction from the digital art community has been mixed. Some artists expressed disappointment, seeing the closure as a step back after years of hard-won validation. Others view it more positively—as a sign that digital art no longer requires its own silo, and that collectors increasingly expect to encounter it alongside painting, sculpture, and photography.
Dealer and curator Sofia Garcia suggests Christie’s withdrawal might encourage a subtler, more integrated approach from auction houses. Robert Alice goes further, framing the move as evidence of Web3’s independence: “The traditional model was never fully aligned with decentralised culture. New institutions are being built elsewhere, and collectors are choosing where they want to be.”
*The digital artist Mike Winkelmann—better known as Beeple—began a discipline that would shape his career and alter the conversation around contemporary art. Each day, he made and posted a new image, refusing to miss a single one, a routine that continued without interruption for over thirteen years. The resulting body of work, more than five thousand separate digital drawings and compositions, eventually coalesced into Everydays: The First 5000 Days.
Christie’s took the project into uncharted territory when it offered the entire cycle as a single digital collage in March 2021. Minted as an NFT and sold in a single-lot auction, the work fetched $69.3 million, a figure that stunned even seasoned observers of the market. The sale was unprecedented: it was the first time a major auction house presented a purely digital work underpinned by a blockchain token guaranteeing authenticity, and the first to accept cryptocurrency—Ether—as payment.
Every day quickly became more than a sale. It was a cultural flashpoint, sparking fierce debates around the legitimacy of digital art, the volatility of NFTs, and the spectacle-driven machinery of the art market itself. For some, it marked the belated recognition of a medium long dismissed at the margins; for others, it signalled the arrival of speculation dressed up as progress.