How Noah Davis Went from Heading Christie’s Beeple Sale to Joining NFT Powerhouse Yuga Labs

As the person who facilitated Beeple’s $69 million sale at Christie’s in February 2021—the event that brought NFTs into the mainstream—Noah Davis has already cemented his place in art history. Last month he started a new job at Yuga Labs – the company that creates and develops NFT collectibles such as Bored Ape Yacht Club – where he is now the brand manager for the recently acquired CryptoPunks collectible. With CryptoPunks accounting for 7 of the top 10 selling NFTs, Davis’ new role is both enviable and terrifying.

Cryptocurrency is in the midst of a bear market, and Yuga Labs is involved in a high-profile lawsuit against concept artist Ryder Ripps for trademark infringement. Still, Davis, who believes that “Web3 is good not just for artists, but for humanity in general,” is undeterred. After a short Zoom chat, it’s easy to see why, if ever there was a person for this job, it’s this fair and idealistic 33-year-old who, in addition to having serious business savvy, is an artist himself.

Davis’ entire professional career, until joining Yuga Labs, was in the traditional art world. He interned in the publication department at Gagosian before joining Christie’s in 2017. There he worked his way up the ranks to become a specialist and ran the online sales department. “I only sold post-war contemporary art online – a category I grew from a sort of backwater or bargain place into a pretty reliable money maker in four years,” he said.

As the “online sales guy,” Davis was also the person who evaluated the Beeple NFT when it was suggested to him by his colleague Megan Doyle, pitching the sale to the 300-year-old auction house. However, the light bulb moment with NFTs didn’t happen for him until later. Everything changed, he said, when “I realized what it is like NFTs do and get past what they are.”

By this, Davis means he saw beyond the aesthetics of most NFTs—an obstacle that stops many traditional art-world folk in their tracks—to the potential of their decentralized technology. “When I got past what NFTs are and into what they do, which is to give currency to a volatile good, I learned that digital goods are not the only use case for NFTs,” he explained, alluding to their ability to to function as everything. from a conditional contract, to a collective record holder, to a memento, an event pass and more. “They’re basically super-dynamic objects with no objectivity. That’s what sold me,” he said. After learning more about decentralization, he also felt that NFTs and blockchain aligned with his personal values ​​in a way that the traditional art world Did not do.

Davis does not hold back about his distaste for the traditional art world. He nodded to a famous quote by David Hammons (an artist he called “the greatest living artist”), to sum up his opinion: “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s too educated, it’s conservative, it’s criticized, not to understand and it’s never fun!” Hammons said in 1986.

“It’s scary, but I think it’s totally fine,” Davis said. “This is a world that operates with its own secret rituals and its own strange pacts behind the scenes; their own solitaires within solitaires. I don’t resonate with that kind of structure at all.”

Davis also said he made more money from his own collectible, Howlerz, than he did during his five years at Christie’s, even with the $69 million Beeple sale. “It was so incredibly empowering. It was massive for me. It totally changed my life,” he said of creating Howlerz, two 5K sets (with a third on the way) of cartoon/tattoo-inspired wolf heads drawn by Davis and generated via a randomization algorithm In addition to giving him financial freedom, Howlerz allowed Davis to build his own NFT community, all of which helped him feel confident enough to openly call himself an artist for the first time, while strengthening his faith on the basic goodness of Web3.

But what about the punks? What will Davis do to ensure or elevate the brand integrity of the world’s most collectively valuable NFTs? And how did they become so valuable in the first place? On this last point, Davis explained, “Provenance is something that’s really important to understand here. And the fact that CryptoPunks were born on the blockchain in 2017 is a huge deal. However, he clarified that ‘early doesn’t necessarily equal elite.’

There are other 2017 NFTs, such as Crypto Kitties and Curio Cards, that did not achieve CryptoPunks’ steep trajectory. The reason punks have this incredible staying power and are as valuable as they are, Davis said, “has to do with the makeup of their community. There are still claims out there who are active members of CryptoPunks, which is amazing to think that they’ve held those assets from zero, literally almost $0, to where they are now.” That’s especially true when you consider that the best-selling punk sold for $23.7 million in February 2022 and the lowest available punk, as of this writing, is $128,961.53.

Davis’ first big move as brand manager is to lead the release of licensing rights to CryptoPunk holders that mirror those of bored Ape Yacht Club holders. These rights include the ability to create new IP (intellectual property) using the CryptoPunk image a holder owns, as long as it does not include hate speech or is used for illegal purposes.

An example of this at work is the recent collaboration between Tiffany & Co. and CryptoPunk holders to create custom Punk pendants, which have at least 30 gems each and go for a modest amount of 30 Ethereum, or about $51,000. Empowering NFT holders to be creative, entrepreneurial ambassadors for a brand instead too tightly controlling a brand’s context from the top down is a hallmark of Web3, and a notable departure from how brands have operated in the past.

“I think brands have been very aggressive in protecting those boundaries historically because there’s been a financial incentive to do that, but that’s changing now culturally with Web3,” Davis said. “The focus is much more on autonomy and encouraging that creativity rather than stomping it out. It has to do with the trustless nature of blockchain and the permissionless way this technology works. It feels wrong to put barriers between creative people and what they want to create.”