Nfts
Christie’s still bets on NFTs and prepares a sale with pioneering artist Robert Alice
If it’s been a while since the letters “NFT” appeared on your art world radar, you’re not alone.
It’s been almost three years since digital art, in the form of non-fungible tokens, has taken the international art market by stormreached maximum levels, then crashed.
Christie’s is now revisiting the category with a major initiative which he describes in press materials as a “full circle” moment. The house is organizing a digital art sale on March 12, with 400 works by pioneer Robert Alice, the first artist to have sold an NFT through the house, even before the auction of Beeple’s Everydays – The First 5,000 Days, which caused a sensation. $69.3 million in 2021.
Alice’s works, titled SOURCE [On NFTs]are visually stunning (and somewhat evocative of art star Mark Bradford), rendered in Day-Glo colors via a methodology that aims to distill the prehistory of NFTs into large fields of color.
Meanwhile, luxury art publisher Bag has just released a huge 600-page tome, On NFTs, edited by Alice. The book explores the evolution of digital art and is billed as the first serious history of the medium. Taschen toasted its publication last night in its Paris store, where the NFT Paris conference is taking place.
On NFTs by Robert Alice. Image provided by Taschen.
“Robert Alice is an artist with whom Christie’s has a long-standing relationship,” said Sebastian Sanchez, head of digital art at the auction house, noting that Christie’s sale of your NFT in 2020 as part of a sculpture “completely overturned the estimation of the time”.
The next Alice sale, the 12th of March, will be the house’s first “on-chain generative art collection,” Sanchez said. Hosted on a “3.0” platform specially designed for digital art, the auction will feature features that might surprise traditional art buyers.
On the one hand, payment can only be made in crypto. Additionally, the event will be held as a sort of Dutch auction, meaning the price of the works will start high and then drop until all 400 works have been sold. (If you want one: act fast.) Although this is “the norm” in the digital art industry, Sanchez said, this is the first time Christie’s has handled a sale this way.
Alice offered some additional insight into what appears to be a mind-blowing project. The 400 works will be “auctioned and created live on the blockchain, using an algorithm called NLP, or natural language processing, which is one of the pillars of machine learning models and is adjacent to AI “, did he declare. “It is a semantic algorithm that allows text to be categorized. This 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 topics and texts – from Walter Benjamin to Seth Siegelaub’s Artist Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement – to find the semantic keywords or “soul of the texts said Alice. These source materials are then “fed” into an algorithm that generates new text phrases that the artist uses to create sprawling, vibrant works.
This creation process parallels the dynamics of the NFT space, which draws inspiration from many different stories, Alice said, ticking off “libertarianism, the history of money and how this has been designed over the years.” of 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 bigger place than the one he started out with in an abandoned police station in south London, where his studio was a former evidence room, “literally the size of a desk,” he said.
How has it handled the volatile ups and downs of the NFT and crypto space over the years? “We learn to live with it,” he says. “When the consensus on a topic is WTF?, that’s usually the most interesting place. Nobody tells us. »
Discussing Alice’s multiple roles as an artist, writer and curator, editor Marlene Taschen told Artnet News in a telephone interview: “It gave me a lot of confidence because he has a background in history art, is an artist and curator. It has many facets.
Example output, Robert Alice, SOURCE [ON NFTs], 2024 © Robert Alice, All rights reserved
In another first, Taschen accepts cryptocurrency through its website for the sale of On NFT, which is available in a numbered “hard code” edition, a “collector’s edition” and 100 “art editions”, which include four coins in limited edition: a signed print and, naturally, an accompanying NFT, by 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 a co-organization,” Taschen said, explaining that Alice “reached out to about 30 artists and asked them for their recommendations. It’s quite democratic, an inspiring group effort.
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