What I’ve Learned: Nicole Sales Giles, Director of Digital Art

It all started with the $69 million Beeple. I’ve been at Christie’s for over 10 years, predominantly working in the Contemporary Art department. In March of 2021, when we sold Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 million, I was managing the business side of our online sale division for contemporary art. The Beeple sale was all online, so it happened to fall under my purview. I managed the business operations and strategy around that sale alongside a colleague who was running the First Open series. We learned a lot very quickly and I loved it.

With zero expectations for what a purely digital artwork would sell for, we started the bidding at $100. In the first eight minutes, it reached $1 million. The only reason the bidding paused there was due to a client accounting check we have in place for online bids over $1 million. We then had to individually clear all bidders above that level. Mid-way through the sale, it became evident that we should be accepting cryptocurrency as payment for this lot. With overwhelming support from our executive team, we were able to work with the Finance, Legal and Compliance teams to make that happen.

After that splash, the Christie’s Digital Art team was born. In the early days of 2021, I focused on developing our business model and strategy, and building partnerships. As the team and market has matured, I now also oversee all business development, artist and client engagement, as well as building our sale programming. Learning from and collaborating with global leaders across industries — not just the art world — was and still is exhilarating. Speaking every day to Web3 experts allows us to build and adopt best practices across the wider blockchain industry.

Running a small start-up within a more than 250-year-old organization is personally very motivating. It can be unnerving at times, but it’s my favourite job I’ve had to-date.

Christie’s is focused on elevating the medium of digital art and providing a high level of curation within a nascent market. Digital art has been around since the 1960s, but the NFT technology that really boomed in 2021 led to a surge of collectors and global interest in this category. Before we sold Beeple’s Everydays, we sold a Robert Alice painting in 2020 that was accompanied by an NFT which served as a certificate of authenticity. Our Prints team also sold an AI generated digital artwork in 2018 and, that same year, we registered all works in the Barney Ebsworth Collection on the blockchain. We’ve been dabbling with digital technology for a while now.

In 2022, we launched Christie’s 3.0, which is the first and only on-chain auction platform from a major auction house. Christie’s 3.0 is a curated marketplace representing the best digital artists working today. Simultaneously, we continue to place more blue-chip digital artworks within our traditional Post-War & Contemporary Art sales in order to continue promoting this medium within contemporary art. By placing a Beeple next to a Basquiat, for example, we’re showing collectors that they deserve similar respect.

The digital art market has matured in recent years. The Beeple sale brought digital art as a medium to the forefront of contemporary art. As the market has changed, the people involved are here for the content or here for the art. They’re collecting or creating art because of the aesthetic or the technology, not necessarily to immediately flip for a profit. There’s a really great community that cares about and understands the space.

You can’t copy and paste current art world solutions to this collecting model. The business model for digital art is entirely different than that of the traditional auction. It’s such an ever-changing market that our team relies on one another to stay up-to-date on trends. We’ve had to create whole new ways to work, and I’ve learned a lot through that.

Diving into the crypto world, there are risks, so we’ve had to liaise with our Compliance and Legal teams to determine how to be as client friendly as possible while also regulatorily compliant. On Christie’s 3.0, we also don’t charge a buyer’s premium to keep in line with industry standards. Because of the on-chain platform, the way we work with the finance team is completely different as well. There are no invoices as payment is automatic. In all these different ways, we’ve really been developing the sale workflow from the ground up.

We are working with artists in a way Christie’s rarely does. Normally, Christie’s sells a painting on behalf of an individual or an institution to the next individual or institution. It’s unusual for Christie’s to operate in the primary market — to launch a new work by an artist or show an unseen painting. So what the digital art team is doing is very different from what Christie’s has done before, and it’s been exciting for us to work directly with artists and creators.

We look for the best of the best within this emerging category, identifying artists who have strong community engagement as well as a proven track record and a collector base. We seek out creators who are using their platform to tell interesting stories and are connecting with their audience in meaningful ways. We’re then here to amplify that narrative. We tell the story of an artist, who they are and what they’re creating, which is a bit different than the focus of some other sales where it’s about the collector or the history of a known and established artist.

We’re engaging with a completely new community. It’s interesting because the artists and collectors in the digital realm are very much in the same circles, which is different from other contemporary collecting groups. It’s not unheard of, but would be much rarer to see, for example, Ed Ruscha hanging out with his collectors on a Saturday night in LA. Whereas, for digital artists and collectors, it’s very common for them to know one another and be working together to push this category forward. I love being part of that.

We’ve seen a lot of crossover with digital collectors moving into other categories. That’s been an unexpected benefit. When we started the digital art team, we believed our existing client base would quickly grow and adapt to the new digital medium. Many certainly have, but we’ve actually seen a lot more crossover from digital art collectors coming to Christie’s and expanding to other categories like Watches, Contemporary Paintings or Prints. Helping our digital art collectors expand their tastes has been a really interesting part of the job.

Most of the growth we see is in the emerging artist category. Digital collectors want to be patrons of new and emerging artists, and to have involvement in their careers from the beginning. For obvious reasons, you can’t do that starting now for, say, an Andy Warhol or a Pablo Picasso. Digital works by artists like Keith Haring certainly have staying power — we sold five of his digital drawings from the mid-1980s in September, which marked the first time these works were offered to the public — but the industry growth is really concentrated on artists who are working in this medium today. I am particularly excited to follow the growth of artists like Sam Spratt, Sasha Stiles, DeeKay and countless more.

We’re always expanding and finding new ways to share Christie’s expertise in the digital art space. One of our biggest initiatives is the annual Art + Tech Summit that we host every July, and it gets better each time. The last few years have been two-day affairs in New York, though we’ve also hosted satellite summits in Dubai and other global cities.

The panels are amazing — captivating speakers have included Cathie Wood, Joe Lubin, Grimes, Metakovan, Commissioner Caroline Pham and Congressman Ritchie Torres — but my favourite part of the event is the side conversations that happen in the Christie’s hallways. There are museum directors talking with artists about how they can collaborate with one another, tech executives talking with digital fashion brands and crypto regulators brainstorming with AI consumer brands. It brings together a really phenomenal group of leaders and experts in their fields.

In addition to Art + Tech, we are also meeting our collectors where they are. For the past three years, we’ve participated in a digital art exhibition in Miami during Art Basel and we did something similar in Korea for Frieze. Christie’s is playing a big role in merging the art world and the blockchain world.

This is a totally new frontier for the company. It’s led me to so many things I never thought I’d be doing as a Christie’s employee. In 2022, for example, we hosted our second digital art auction to benefit the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is an incredible charity. We had the exhibition in Denver at the Psychedelic Studies conference. I never would have thought I would be traveling to a psychedelics conference for work! The art was amazing and the proceeds went towards extraordinary research.

Working directly with the artists also brings a new opportunity every time. Once, during a Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, we were selling a work by FEWOCiOUS and he wanted to create a painting in the Christie’s galleries during the exhibition. It was fun and we made it happen, but that’s something that had never been done before. On a personal level, it’s so exciting to be involved in such a dynamic and changing market.

Christie's eighth annual Art + Tech conference will be hosted in our Rockefeller Center galleries on 17-18 July. Tickets can be purchased here.