Sale Overview
Christie’s is honored to present Andy Warhol: Machine Made, a ground-breaking online auction of five unique NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of digital works created by Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s and recovered from obsolete floppy disks in 2014. In a first for the nascent market for digital art and NFTs, five Warhol works, which previously existed only as digital files unreadable by modern computers, are brought to life again in the form of unique NFTs minted exclusively by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. As no other NFTs will be minted from these five digital works restored from Warhol’s originals, this sale marks a rare opportunity for collectors.
Created in a paint program on Warhol’s Commodore Amiga personal computer in the mid-1980’s, the group of five works includes two self-portraits, his signature flower, and Campbell’s soup can motifs, and a rendering of a single banana on a blue background. Each of the five unique tokens, authorized and minted by the Warhol Foundation, points to a restored and preserved file which retains all of the artistry of Warhol’s Amiga compositions, as well as the artist’s intent, in a digital format that can be accessed with today’s technology.
These five works are offered for sale individually by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in partnership with Christie’s. Proceeds from this sale, after any appropriate offsets for carbon emissions associated with the minting process, will benefit the Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic grant-making organization. In addition to providing substantial annual funding for The Andy Warhol Museum, the Foundation’s initiatives provide vital support to working artists throughout the country, including emergency funds for artists affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sale will be open for bidding from 19-27 May.