Christie's Gets Into Technology as It Prepares an Auction of Proofs of Human Ingenuity

Three years ago, Christie's became the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work of art for auction—an NFT by American graphic designer Mike Winkelmann, known under the pseudonym Beeple. With a sale price of 69 million dollars, the work immediately became the most expensive NFT on the market. While NFTs faced a slump after experiencing a record year in 2021, Christie's continues to focus on digital art. "We think that the NFT and digital art world has a long future. Yes, there will be peaks and valleys along the way," said Christie's President Bonnie Brennan.

That's why last year Christie's hired former Microsoft executive Devang Thakkar to develop a venture arm investing in new technologies. Last year, Christie's invested in the hologram company Proto. At the long-awaited February auction of pop star Elton John's eclectic art collection, it was his hologram that greeted arrivals. Christie's president used the technology herself to "attend" the Los Angeles conference. The technology also allows the auction house to virtually display the artworks themselves. When Christie's displayed Edgar Degas' "Little Dancer" in San Francisco, Brennan remarked that "the technology is so good that we've had clients actually say they thought they saw the work of art."

The Gen One collection is currently on display at New York's Rockefeller Center, where the aforementioned Art+Tech Summit took place. It's a collection of objects by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen charting some of the most important technological innovations of the last century. The collection, which will be auctioned on September 10th, includes items such as the 1976 Apple-1 personal computer that Steve Jobs had on his desk. There's a 1934 letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt that brought the U.S. into the nuclear age, as well as a spacesuit for the first astronaut in space from 1964.

"We want to keep our heritage," says Bonnie Brennan. "It's just really responding to and giving people what they want. We see people collecting differently than they did 50 years ago. If you told me we'd have a handbag department 30 years ago, I might have pushed back a little," she adds. How people engage with art today is so much different than before. "It's not just hanging things on their walls, it's having things in their closet, it's sneakers in a case," Brennan continues, adding that the Allen collection has generated considerable demand and appeals to a wider audience of bidders than traditional art. "This is a piece of American history," concludes Christie's president.