Christie’s, a 256-year-old auction house, has teamed up with luxury fashion house Gucci to launch a digital art non-fungible token (NFT) collection. The auction will be called “Future Frequencies: Explorations in Generative Art and Fashion.”
Christie’s and Gucci explore generative NFT art and fashion
According to reports, the collection includes 21 NFTs by AI artist Claire Silver, generative artist Emily Xie, decentralized autonomous artist Botto, and others. The auction, which will take place on Christie’s 3.0, the auction house’s digital art platform, will open for bidding on July 18 and finish on July 25.
The NFT line is inspired by Gucci textiles, color palettes, and the brand’s renowned Bamboo 1947 range of handbags with the brand’s trademark bamboo handle. The collection intends to assist in promoting creativity through the junction of art, fashion, and technology by using generative systems like algorithms and AI.
Sebastian Sanchez, Christie’s Manager of Digital Art Sales, told media outlets that the partnership encourages both artists and the fashion sector to use Web3 technologies.
The outputs they’ve created range from abstract to literal and are completely fascinating, changing the way we can think about using algorithms and data to advance human creativity across fields. […] My goal with this auction is to show the intersection – it’s a spectrum right now. There are so many generative artists who are working with studies on textiles, garments, patterns, and then you have people actually doing literal 3D garments, and what we’re presenting is everywhere in between those ranges.
Sebastian Sanchez
The sale and exhibition will take place in New York with Christie’s sixth Art + Tech Summit this summer. Sanchez stated that the collaboration with Gucci adds poignancy to the collection and enables both art collectors and fashion fans to investigate the art’s interconnected themes.
The Gucci name has such a power, and they have their own audience and a proven record that their audience is probably very different from ours. […] That, to me, is kind of where the beauty in our collaboration lies – Christie’s is an art expert, and Gucci is a fashion expert, and we’re kind of like right in the middle.
Sebastian Sanchez
NFT auctions take root in traditional financial entities
Gucci has been gradually expanding its digital fashion and art endeavors, whereas Christie’s has been firmly entrenched in the Web3 space since the record-breaking sale of artist Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS” NFT for $69 million in March 2021.
In February of 2022, the brand acquired land in the metaverse The Sandbox in order to build the Gucci Vault, its digital experience venue. It invested $25,000 in SuperRare’s native RARE token in June 2022 in order to join the marketplace’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and launch its “Vault Art Space” for displaying NFT art.
The brand announced a partnership with Yuga Labs earlier this year to introduce high fashion to the Otherside.
Claire Silver, a pseudonymous NFT artist whose solo exhibition at SuperRare’s New York City gallery recently opened, spoke about the two works she created for the collection.
Combining AI, 3D, film, and advanced mathematical functions with antique paintings and tapestries from China, Japan, and Eastern and Western Europe, both works are intended to celebrate the era of AI: the sophistication of experience, the innocent joy of the new, the depth of cultural heritage, and the light of the future.
Claire Silver
The auction takes place on Christie’s 3.0, its blockchain-based auction platform that was introduced last year, and the works will also be featured on Gucci Art Space, the luxury brand’s online gallery space. This followed the launch of Gucci’s Vault Art Space in 2022, when the strictly digital environment hosted the debut auction and exhibition, “The Next 100 Years of Gucci,” which auctioned off a selection of NFT artworks.
The gallery, a product of a collaboration between Gucci and SuperRare, a marketplace for one-of-a-kind curated NFT artworks, functions as a venue for viewing and collecting the visions of contemporary artists through a regular rotation of exhibitions.
