For quite some time, the NFT community has been a microcosm of investors, creators and believers. Before the early 2021 bullrun, the space was definitively niche. But as sales volume rose and institutional money started pouring in, NFTs catapulted into the mainstream and Noah Davis has become a critical bridge between the traditional and crypto art worlds.

Even those outside the NFT community have heard of Beeple’s $69 million Christie’s auction. A landmark moment for the space, the sale not only exposed NFTs to the world, but set fine art and old money on a crash course to crypto art discovery — with Davis leading the charge.

As AVP Specialist and Head of Digital Sales, Contemporary Art at legendary auction house Christie’s, Davis first entered the world of NFTs towards the end of 2020. He says the COVID-19 pandemic had a lot to do with Christie’s taking the plunge into NFT sales.

“Timing is everything,” says Davis. “If this hadn’t been the tail end of the pandemic, I don’t know if the world would have been ready for it, and I don’t know if Christie’s would have been that psyched about trying something new.”

He adds: “We’ve sold Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons, we sell meteorites. If it has value to somebody somewhere we can find a way to market it and sell it. That’s what we’ve been doing for 300 years. So that part wasn’t so difficult.”

On this episode of the nft now podcast, Noah Davis discusses the traditional and crypto art worlds colliding, the future of NFT auctions and more.

Beyond handholding for the old guard in their endeavors to understand the blockchain, Davis has seen where NFTs have been, and wants to ensure that Christie’s will be a part of their future. He is uninterested with simply converting IRL art and auction experiences to the blockchain, but rather, wants to create something new that reinvents auction houses within the metaverse.

“My thesis is that the best NFTs can only exist as an NFT. That one-to-one correspondence doesn’t work,” says Davis. “If I’m building in the metaverse, it’s going to be a unique experience and there’s going to be a draw. Because the more you try to find this one-to-one correspondence – it’s not going to be able to replicate the real life experience.”

Looking ahead, Davis is very bullish on the future of NFTs and believes the barriers between the traditional art world and the NFT space will continue to break down.

“A lot of the really exciting stuff is still in the incubation phase,” says Davis. “So I am confident that, barring a catastrophic world event in which the blockchain just falls apart, that NFTs will continue to be explosive.”
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