Christie’s CEO: Andy Warhol is the next NFT star

After auctioning off some of the world’s first NFT artworks for $17 million last week, Christie’s is trying to one-up itself by turning back the clock even further.

The auction house has partnered with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to sell NFTs created from digital artworks Andy Warhol created in the 1980s. That comes after selling 8-bit artworks from Cryptopunks, some of the first digital artworks embedded with code to convey ownership.

First Move’s Julia Chatterley spoke to Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti Wednesday.

For me Andy is at the intersection of an established commercial pop artist and then the digital art world. What does this represent for Christie’s and for Andy Warhol as an artist?

Cerutti: I think it’s a logical next step after what we’ve done in March, selling for $46 million from a crypto artist, what we’re doing last week — for the first time presenting at our major auction site in New York, crypto funds achieved $17 million. And now what’s next is we consign the past and the present, this digital art was invented, created, conceived by Andy Warhol, retrieved a few years ago, and now back to life through the NFT and the possibility to secure the uniqueness and the authenticity of his work.

How much competition did you face getting a hold of these prints and being able to sell them.

Cerutti: A few months ago it was Christie’s that rediscovered or revealed this existing reality of the crypto art market. It’s great that now the whole market is embracing this category. At Christies we just want to innovate and do things we believe are right at the right moment. That’s exactly what’s happening right now with these works by Andy Warhol.

About Andy Warhol specifically, there’s so much supply out there. He was a classic mass production artist. What’s the benefit of him adding more supply?

Cerutti: He was incredibly creative, that’s true. But look he’s one of the most sought after artists on the art market. Last week in New York we sold several art works by Andy Warhol for great prices. The NFTs we’re going to sell are unique, they are authentic, new to the market, they are featuring well-known images by warhol, self-portraits, the soup can. So we expect these works to be offered for a low price of $1,000 to appeal to many collectors. Traditional collectors and crypto collectors.