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Christie's Deletes Digital Art Department

47 points| recursive4 | 5 months ago |news.artnet.com

31 comments

order

fullshark|5 months ago

The whole NFT craze was embarrassing and very revealing about what powers a lot of people's belief in crypto.

gdbsjjdn|5 months ago

Everyone who was trading monkey JPEGs has moved on to claiming that they can replace your staff with an LLM.

staplers|5 months ago

Digital art and NFT's are not synonymous. I know many digital artists who never bothered with them and could see the triviality. Unsurprisingly many art haters use this as a way to subtly reinforce their bias.

foxglacier|5 months ago

I'd say it also revealed to a lot of lay people that the traditional high end art market is basically the same as NFTs. The value is purely in the scarcity and having enough other people paying into it to create inflated values far beyond the utility of the product itself. Even super famous paintings like the Mona Lisa aren't really worth much as art - we can create equally good reproductions, but those don't have scarcity so they don't have value beyond the work it takes to create them.

petertodd|5 months ago

Don't confuse NFT gambling with Bitcoin. The former is a dying craze as the gamblers move onto something else. The latter is at all-time-highs, for the obvious reason that a digital replacement for gold is clearly useful, and Bitcoin is the obvious leader in that market category.

Indeed, for certain use-cases Bitcoin is competing with Christies too: a lot of the fine art market is actually about storing and moving value. Not about the art.

xn|5 months ago

Hope they backed up the seed phrase for the Art Department before deleting it.

yieldcrv|5 months ago

> The company will continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th and 21st Century Art category

jeron|5 months ago

one interpretation is that they're not interested in digital art

the other interpretation is that digital art has become contemporary art

I like the latter

bze12|5 months ago

They’re folding the nft department into contemporary art. But I wouldn’t say the first interpretation is invalid either.

yieldcrv|5 months ago

it is the latter, they are continuing to sell digital art and NFTs and they realized their “specialists” didn't have specialized knowledge to justify a separate division

It just takes slower people longer to see the simple similarities to what they already do

regarding the catalyst for consolidating at Christie’s, the whole art market is following a similar downtrend in price and volume as the NFT market since 2022, there was an article about fine art and the contemporary market here the other day

sandspar|5 months ago

NFT's continue to draw many talented artists. The scene is thriving.