NFTs
Christie’s is still betting on NFTs and preparing the sale with pioneering artist Robert Alice
If it’s been a while since the letters “NFT” appeared anywhere on the art world’s radar, you’re not alone.
It’s been almost three years since digital art, in the form of non-fungible tokens, invaded the international art marketreached maximum levels and then fell.
Christie’s is now revisiting the category with a great initiative which he describes in press materials as a “full circle” moment. The house will hold a digital art sale on March 12th, with 400 works by pioneer Robert Alice – the first artist to have an NFT sold by the house, predating even Beeple’s Everydays – The First 5,000 Days auction, which made a a staggering $69.3 million in 2021.
Alice’s works, entitled SOURCE [On NFTs]are visually stunning (and somewhat evocative of art star Mark Bradford), rendered in Day-Glo colors through a methodology that aims to distill the prehistory of NFTs into large fields of color.
Meanwhile, luxury art publisher Taschen has just released a massive 600-page tome, On NFTs, edited by Alice. The book explores the evolution of digital art and is being touted as the first serious history of the medium. Taschen toasted its publication last night in its Paris store, where the NFT Paris conference is underway.
In NFTs by Roberto Alice. Image courtesy of Taschen.
“Robert Alice is an artist with whom Christie’s has had a long relationship,” said Sebastian Sanchez, the auction house’s digital art manager, noting that Christie’s sell your NFT in 2020 as part of a sculpture “completely destroyed the estimation of the time”.
Alice’s next sale, in March 12, it will be the house’s first “online generative art collection,” Sanchez said. Hosted on a “3.0” platform built specifically for digital art, the auction will have features that may surprise traditional art buyers.
For one, payment can only be made in crypto. Additionally, the event will function as a sort of Dutch auction, meaning that the price of the works will start high and then fall until all 400 works have been sold. (If you want: Act fast.) While it’s “the standard” in the digital art industry, Sanchez said, it’s the first time Christie’s has handled a sale this way.
Alice offered more information about what appears to be a mind-boggling project. The 400 works will be “auctioned and minted live on the blockchain, using an algorithm called NLP, or natural language processing, which is one of the backbones of machine learning models and is adjacent to AI,” he said. “It’s a good semantic algorithm for categorizing text. It allows machines to understand not only the meaning of words, but also their semantics.”
Example output, Robert Alice, SOURCE [ON NFTs], 2024 © Robert Alice, All rights reserved (3).
The algorithm was trained on a wide range of subjects and texts – from Walter Benjamin to Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement – to find the semantic keywords or “soul of the texts,” Alice said. These source materials are then “fed” into an algorithm that generates new sentences of text that the artist uses to create extensive, vibrant works.
This creation process parallels the dynamics of the NFT space, which is based on many different stories, Alice said, noting “libertarianism, the history of money and how that has been designed over time, the history of crypto-anarchy.”
Alice was speaking to Artnet News via Zoom from London, where he was putting the finishing touches on a new studio – a much grander place than the one he had in his early days in an abandoned police station in south London, where his studio was a former testing room, “literally the size of a table,” he said.
How has he handled the volatile ups and downs of the NFT and crypto space over the years? “You learn to live with it,” he said. “When the consensus on an issue is WTF?, that’s often the most interesting place to be. Nobody tells us that.”
Discussing Alice’s multi-hyphenate roles as an artist, writer and curator, editor Marlene Taschen told Artnet News in a phone interview: “It gave me a lot of confidence because he has a background in art history, he’s an artist and he’s a curator. . It has many facets.”
Example output, Robert Alice, SOURCE [ON NFTs], 2024 © Robert Alice, all rights reserved
In other news, Taschen is accepting cryptocurrency through its website for sales of On NFTs, which are available in a numbered “hard code” edition, a “collector’s edition,” and 100 “artist editions,” which feature four pieces limited edition—a signed print and, naturally, an accompanying NFT—from different artists, including Refik Anadol.
Taschen described the two-and-a-half-year effort to create the book as an “ongoing, organic, and informative process.”
“It’s kind of co-curated,” Taschen said, explaining that Alice “approached about 30 artists and asked for recommendations. It’s very democratic, an inspiring group effort.”
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