Christie's Deletes Digital Art Department
16 comments
·September 10, 2025fullshark
gdbsjjdn
Everyone who was trading monkey JPEGs has moved on to claiming that they can replace your staff with an LLM.
tptacek
I have no idea what the former has to do with the latter. NFTs were a scam (I think the same about crypto more generally, but know that's a more idiosyncratic belief). LLMs are not.
Is your point that LLMs are overhyped? Everything is overhyped. That's not what distinguished NFTs from previous hype cycles; the fact that there was literally nothing there is what distinguished it.
LastTrain
I believe his point is something like this: entrepreneurs used to look for ideas on how to create something of value that people want, and then create a sustainable business model out of it, in order to turn a profit. There was some pride in pleasing customers. Now they look for ideas to make a profit, whether or not something of actual value is created or if people actually want it.
staplers
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.
xn
Hope they backed up the seed phrase for the Art Department before deleting it.
yieldcrv
> The company will continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th and 21st Century Art category
jeron
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
They’re folding the nft department into contemporary art. But I wouldn’t say the first interpretation is invalid either.
yieldcrv
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
staplers
Art is always a lagging indicator of loose monetary policy. Same time interest rates shot up.
The whole NFT craze was embarrassing and very revealing about what powers a lot of people's belief in crypto.