#christies

#christies

On March 11, 2021, Christie's made history as the first major auction house to sell art in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). Digital artist Beeple managed to offload his massive mosaic, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for a whopping $69 million, generating hundreds of astonished headlines and getting those three letters, NFT, in front of untold scads of early-adopter eyeballs. It was the sale heard 'round the world, a starter pistol kicking off the NFT gold rush.

In 2018, Christie's catapulted AI artwork into the mainstream when they sold the Paris-based collective Obvious's GANS inkprint Portrait of Le Comte de Belamy (2018) for $432,500, dwarfing the work's high estimate of $10,000. And, few could forget the March 2021 sale of Beeple's digital work Everyday: The First 5000 Days (2021), which hammered at $69.3m (the house applied no estimate) and put NFTs on the art world map.

Judging by recent auction records that have been set by numerous artists from the Arab world and conversations with curators of major collections across the globe, it seems that demand for Arab art has expanded beyond the region into Western and Eastern collections.

"After being cherished for multiple generations in a family collection and being generously lent to museum exhibitions around the world, we are honoured to present this Impressionist masterpiece," Vanessa Fusco, the head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie's New York, said in a statement.