How an Atmosphere of Political Suppression has made Crypto Art Disinteresting, Disengaged, and Devalued

by Maxwell Cohen

I. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

A few days before I started writing this essay, the conservative commentator, Charlie Kirk, was murdered at an open-air debate. Soon thereafter, Jimmy Kimmel — veteran late-night host — spoke flippantly about Kirk’s murder, prompting the U.S. executive branch to warn of consequences for his words. Kimmel was promptly removed from the air (his “indefinite” suspension has since concluded). Around the same time, the U.S. Department of Defense announced it would suspend personnel for any social media posts criticizing Kirk while the U.S. State Department has revoked the visas of foreign nationals who posted unsympathetically about Kirk, or in their words “celebrated [his] heinous assassination.”

Ours is an environment where all political rhetoric is deemed morally reprehensible by someone, and routinely incurs life-altering consequences. We are oft reminded that the safest way to navigate real-world tumult is to keep quiet and turn away.

Which crypto art, ever the pioneer, has known for quite some time now.

This is an essay about how crypto art stopped saying anything at all.

For months, I’ve been thinking about this late-July post from SuperRare’s Head of Brand and Marketing, Joshua Long:

Specifically this part: “Art being elevated that strikes no cultural chord with anyone outside of this niche space.”

That phrase speaks to me, louder and louder all the time. Because I do frequently feel that something crucial is missing with all this art. It is routinely beautiful and technically-inventive, and yet…

And yet…

And yet so much of our most “important” art — i.e. that which sells for six-figures and is curated by museums and is bragged about as an object of reverence, primed for inclusion in the historical canon — seems disconnected from everything occurring in the wider world.

Consider a few of the more loudly-celebrated artistic achievements from the last few months:

• AlphaCentauriKid’s piano concert at Carnegie Hall;
• The Toledo Museum of Art’s Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms exhibition of algorithmic and generative artistry;
• SuperRare OFFLINE Gallery shows featuring SlimeSunday’s sexually-suggestive collages, Chema Mendez’ impressionistic animations, and Richard Nadler’s generative architectural explorations, etc.

These artworks are universally gorgeous, self-interrogative, and technologically daring. And yet, do any appear to notice the chaos swirling just outside the gallery? Do they really?

At its outset, this essay was intended to reveal and discuss what I felt was an atmosphere of hostility and suppression towards artists who publicly shared, on social media or in their art, Pro-Palestinian opinions. Undoubtedly, there is an atmosphere of fear and suppression surrounding the topic. But it’s not just that topic. It’s everything that offends, upsets, or confronts.

Israel or Palestine, conservative or liberal, capitalist or socialist; artists reckoning with such generation-shaping conflicts are often point-blank punished for their commentary. And so what has taken hold instead is a culture of disengagement. For reasons both mundane and maddening, our most important art functionally refrains from commenting on the world as it is. Collectors, exhibitions, and auctioneers refuse to value such art anyways.

This is not a work in progress. We are here. It’s time to really look at what we’ve become, at the real cost of all this so-incentivized silence.

II. Israel and Palestine

Since its inception, crypto art has purported itself as a bastion of freedom. No middlemen! No gatekeepers! Revolutionary and decentralized! But if these things are true today, then why is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — undoubtedly the most contentious and incendiary political issue of my tricenarian life — nearly absent from its mainstream dialectic? Central in political and intellectual life everywhere in the world, but here virtually untouched.

Yes, we can identify individual artworks that confront the issue, and a few collectors who tirelessly encourage them, like Omz and FlyingBeagle. And yes, there is much more political art to be found on Tezos than Ethereum; the third Art for Humanity auction therein — a collection of 196 works fundraising for Palestinian aid — has at the time of this writing generated over 35,000 $TEZ, or about $24,000 USD, in sales. These things are real, this work is being done. And so it is unfair to characterize crypto art as entirely silent or disengaged.

But let’s not kid ourselves. $24,000 dollars is less than 1/5th the price of a single piece from Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza (2021) collection, of which there are 999 pieces. There exists an elevated arena where “important” events, individuals, and artworks all exist. Enter that arena, and politics are subditi-non-grata.

Few would know that better than 0xTjo, who throughout 2022 and 2023 became one of crypto art’s most recognizable artists, famously selling his piece, BleU (2022), for 69 $ETH. One of only 61 artists represented by Art of this Millenium, Tjo has achieved overwhelming success in crypto art by any calculation. “I’m not trying to brag,” he told me, “but I had a certain place in this environment that was kind of privileged.” In early 2024, however, as Israeli military activity in the Gaza Strip began to draw wider global condemnation, Tjo became quite vocally Pro-Palestinian. The blowback was immediate and pronounced.

“People kept reaching out in DMs or just saying hateful things in my comments…saying that I was a terrorist sympathizer,” he told me. “It was in April 2024 when I started to see my market be directly affected…people getting rid of pieces for huge losses, not because they needed to necessarily, just as sort of spite selling: ‘I’m mad at you, I’m just going to sell this.’”

Driftershoots, the dare-devil photographer known for free-climbing skyscrapers, may have suffered an even more intense decline. While Drifter did not respond to my request for comment, multiple sources mentioned how Drifter’s DMs and comments swelled with vitriol after he publicly espoused Pro-Palestinian viewpoints following Hamas’ October 7th terrorist attacks. Within a month, he had deleted his Twitter account altogether, which has yet to be reinstated. Yes, lack of Twitter engagement is essentially a death sentence in an online movement like crypto art, but does that Twitterlessness alone explain why his highest-valued collection, Where My Vans Go (2021), dropped nearly 70% in price between late 2023 and early 2024?

The great irony is that Drifter was otherwise beloved for his controversy-causing. Most of his climbs were performed illegally, leading to multiple arrests. Drifter was the poster-child for a stick-it-to-the-man ideology that would risk everything — life and limb and legality — for the sake of free expression. But that free expression could only apparently operate within pre-approved limits. As a result of espousing political views, fringe or extreme as they might have been at the time, Driftershoots was battered into submission.

“It’s just that slowly you become sort of like a taboo artist or a very risky investment,” 0xTjo explained. “Even the people that weren’t necessarily pro-Israeli just didn’t want to associate with an artist who would speak about that.” I asked him how this lack of association expressed itself day-to-day. “It’s radio silence from one day to the other. There’s suddenly no more communication.”

Reflecting a sentiment shared by others I spoke to, 0xTjo characterized crypto art as “a very very small space controlled by a very, very small group of people that share very similar values,” which he mentioned being more-or-less reflective of the traditional art world (a scary thought). If those values do not align with an artist’s, the ensuing lack of collection and distribution, and the eradicated relationships, can prove destructive to an artist’s career. “You need to reach consensus with certain people in the space to come to a certain level of success,” he went on, “and it doesn’t take much for you to become a risk. It’s easy to break the confidence of these people if you are in that circle.”

The long-time collector Omz, who frequently speaks about the suffering of civilians in Gaza, discussed the consequences of collector disinterest on the wider artistic environment. “Artists respond to incentives,” he told me. “If collectors create a safe space for artists and show them that they’re not going to be punished, then they will express themselves. But if they see that the only vocal collectors are actually going to punish them, and then the other collectors are just silent, what are they going to do?” Ours is not a safe space for artists, Omz reasoned, as evidenced by the “tangible, heavy silence from artists who are against what is going on but who are not saying anything for the fear [of retribution].”

Tjo is just one recipient of that retribution. Another is Natrix, an artist whose long history of being blacklisted and shadowbanned traces back to her years spent advocating for sex-worker sovereignty. “A lot of artists are afraid,” she said. “And it’s not unique to this space…You can see famous artists losing contracts constantly for talking about Palestine.”

And so most artists choose simply not to talk about it, for practical reasons they remain entirely aware of. One artist connected to Art for Humanity, who I spoke to under condition of anonymity, said, “There were a lot of artists who very much supported [Art for Humanity], and privately sent me messages. ‘Hey, I can’t join due to these types of social issues, and I don’t want to mess with my market. I know my collectors are a little uneasy and I don’t want to go into a political route.’” Tjo mentioned receiving nearly identical messages. So did Natrix. So did the outspoken photographer, Giulio Aprin.

Aprin blames this widespread fear of free expression on collectors. “There is a whole power dynamic where these collectors feel like they can say and do whatever because artists would bow and kneel, never putting in jeopardy their revenue or their career by stepping out of line.”

Altogether, here were the charges levied at collectors throughout my interviews:

-Deliberately tanking the market of established artists who made public Pro-Palestinian comments;

-Colluding with other influential figures to suppress amplification of openly Pro-Palestinian artists;

-Pressuring exhibitions to ban or remove Pro-Palestinian work;

-Taking passive-aggressive action (such as sending hateful DMs, scouring a person’s timeline and liking every single non-political post, etc.) against those with public Pro-Palestinian views.

These accusations, shared independently across over a half-dozen interviews, wholly corroborate each other. I have little choice but to take it as fact that such suppressive activity is happening, and to a significant extent.

And yet, that’s not the point of this essay.

The point is this:

The actions of these influential figures (outside of the passive-aggressive post-liking stuff, which is honestly super weird and pathetic) while seen from one perspective as oppressive, simultaneously strike me as so reasonable and so easily-understandable that they may be unavoidable altogether.

The point is I get where these people are coming from.

Against all my inclinations, I find myself sympathizing with crypto art’s perceived oppressors. Not only was that conclusion entirely unexpected, it emerged from the most unexpected of places: crypto art’s single most dramatic instance of alleged censorship and suppression.

III. Crypto Art’s Single Most Dramatic Instance of Alleged Censorship and Suppression

“What we call ‘the space’ is 80% Twitter. At the end of the day it’s Twitter,” John Karp told me. And he would know.

Karp founded and runs the annual NFCSummit conference in Lisbon, one of crypto art’s last-standing international gatherings. This past June, in a dramatic Twitter thread, Karp and NFC were publicly accused of deplatforming and censorship by the artists CyberYuyu and Sixela.

CyberYuyu is undoubtedly influential in our space. Well-known for a style which combines Renaissance imagery, sexual suggestivity, queer iconography, and his own likeness, Yuyu forged a strong multiyear relationship with NFCSummit, earning a main-stage spot at three straight conferences. Both Karp and Yuyu described a close relationship with each other to that point, which led to Yuyu being announced as one of two “ticket artists” for NFCSummit this year, meaning the conference’s tickets bore Yuyu’s artwork (stalwart crypto artist, Trevor Jones, was the other). Such a decision promised huge levels of ongoing exposure and attention.

Long outraged by Israel’s actions in Gaza, Yuyu and Sixela wanted to use this elevated platform to make a political statement. Yuyu’s customary style would be their Trojan Horse. “We wanted [the piece] to be shocking…because we feel there is a fear of speaking out about this topic…So we wanted this element of surprise, and we wanted people to come to see something very romantic and pretty and fun, like the shows we did the previous two years, and instead give them something completely different that we felt needed to be spoken about,” Sixela said. The resulting seven-minute video piece, Amor Vitae (2025), appears at its outset to be a hype-laden celebration of Yuyu’s career to that point. But after a few minutes, the tone and aesthetics morph into catastrophe: a stark, piano-aided melody plays over harrowing photographs of geographic devastation as news headlines, statistics, and accusations of genocide in Gaza flash on the screen. “We knew there would be backlash if we promoted up-front that it was about Gaza,” Yuyu told me. “Then people might not come, and we would have triggered others and the organizers.”

They certainly succeeded in triggering Karp, who on or about May 29th encountered Amor Vitae after it was uploaded to NFCSummit’s shared Google Drive, wherein all exhibiting artists submit their pieces. Karp was outraged, calling Yuyu and Sixela to tell them, “I did not want to see the piece at NFC. I saw it as a dividing message, and I personally was shocked about it. I saw it the wrong way maybe, but I saw it as a hateful piece at this time.”

Karp’s immediate feeling was that the piece be scrapped. As per Yuyu, “[Karp] proposed that we change the content or remove the video and do a sanitized, pre-approved artist interview instead. It was just his decision not to show it.” Karp suggested this was more of a mutually agreed-upon understanding. Regardless, after seeking advice from friends, Karp began to wonder if he was indeed engaging in censorship.

Eventually, Karp “called [the artists] again and said ‘Okay, let’s get this piece shown.” His reasoning was simple, noble even. “It’s not my call to say whether this is art or not,” he told me. “These are the artists’ views, and it’s not my job to police that.” As Karp reiterated repeatedly, this turnaround was entirely his decision.

And so Amor Vitae was shown in its originally-assigned slot: 11:30am on the NFCSummit main-stage, Wednesday, June 4th.

And maybe this whole situation would have ended altogether if Yuyu and Sixela did not release their accusatory Twitter thread two weeks after the conference, claiming their “names were erased from official posts. No video. No mention. Nothing that proved we had ever stood on that stage.” They provided two specific examples of NFCSummit purposefully limiting their exposure, and that this amounted to censorship:

1. being removed from NFCSummit’s online schedule in advance of their show;
2. as a visibly-angry Sixela told me, “If you go to NFC’s profile on Twitter and you search ‘CyberYuyu,’ you will see a bunch of posts which are all before this last week of May. And after that there is not a single mention of his existence at all.”

Karp quickly posted his own thread, “Statement — In Response to Yuyu,” wherein, he admits, “I was emotional. I used the word ‘propaganda’ [to describe Amor Vitae]. I won’t pretend otherwise,” before challenging Yuyu’s accusations, as seen below:

Upon some research, it was surprisingly easy to confirm both aforementioned accusations. While NFCSummit’s schedule of events contains a page for the Amor Vitae performance, I was unable to find that page listed on NFCSummit’s main calendar. Yuyu’s performance does seem to have been removed, though I cannot be sure when this happened.

And other than reposting Karps’ thread, the NFCSummit Twitter page has not mentioned Yuyu even once after May 28th, which correlates with the timeline given to me by both Karp and Yuyu. These were NFCSummit’s final public interactions with Yuyu:

While NFC has posted hundreds of retrospective tweets on this year’s conference, always tagging or mentioning the exhibited artists, not a single one references Yuyu or Amor Vitae. NFCSummit did, evidently, avoid any mention of their performance.

And yet, after hearing perspectives on this saga twice over, and after confirming these accusations, I found myself thinking at length about Karp’s above question:

“Is that really enough to turn this into a public accusation of censorship?

Four separate times in our conversation, Karp emphasized that “[NFCSummit is] a very, very small organization, and we are 100% self-funded. There are no investors, and even this year we didn’t really have a main sponsor. Who is bringing enough money to make it break-even?” Even Yuyu and Sixela acknowledged that “[NFCSummit] were having a lot of issues with sponsors retracting their participation [this year] because money was very not easy to spend.”

NFCSummit is a miniscule operation run by a tiny team of curators and organizers. Showing such controversial artwork on their main-stage would naturally prove offensive and alienating to many. With storied platforms like Makersplace and Async.art recently shuttering, with the number of surviving conferences dwindled to a handful, with a well-known difficulty raising funds, could NFCSummit — considering its salaried staff and its emphatic devotion to gathering crypto artists together somewhere — afford to do so? Sixela and Yuyu admitted that even in rehearsals their video caused outrage among those who saw it. As Karp professes in his thread, “The room [for Amor Vitae]? Actually pretty full.” NFC did show the piece. People did come. Karp did take that risk.

Karp ultimately decided to show this piece even though doing so might have incurred existential consequences. Merely platforming a piece like this — whether or not we believe it is immoral to remain silent on the Israel/Palestine topic — would inarguably subject NFCSummit to public outrage. Maybe you think that our morals must supersede our tangible needs, and I admire that point of view, but it is unrealistic to expect others to share it. Every time NFCSummit would have republicized Amor Vitae, they would have further and further politicized themselves. Few can afford that kind of political taint in such a tenuous financial environment. Reliant on outside sponsorship for their existence, NFCSummit’s priority must be universal appeal. They risked that appeal, full-stop, by giving a controversial work like Amor Vitae a platform at all.

Which is why I wanted to discuss the Yuyu-and-NFC saga in such detail, because it perfectly distills the oh-so-human response to politicization on every side.

Yuyu and Sixela acted about as boldly and bravely as one can hope from artists with a platform. Yuyu leveraged his stature and preexisting relationships so as to make a public, provocative Pro-Palestinian statement, putting his entire career in jeopardy to do so. In the aftermath, Yuyu told me, “we don’t know who to trust or what’s the meaning of doing cultural work anymore.” Risk taken, consequences accepted.

At the same time, Karp and NFCSummit acted boldly and bravely themselves. Showing Amor Vitae was a tremendous risk, especially within a space that would cheerfully defenestrate artists as influential as 0xTjo and Driftershoots for voicing unwelcome opinions. Exhibition is endorsement as far as half of people are concerned. Lack of speech is violence, according to the other half. Damned if they did, damned if they didn’t, Karp and NFCSummit chose to do. Could they have done more? Unequivocally. But I take great issue with characterizing their actions as censorship just because the lengths to which they went were not considered far enough.

But this is the reality of any extreme political situation: everyone involved, good or evil, left or right, righteous or defensive, gets victimized. Yuyu and Sixela feel silenced, Karp and NFC feel unfairly accused of impropriety, and everyone suffers. If Yuyu and Sixela soften the message of their piece, their morals are compromised. If Karp even momentarily amplifies a political message, his organization is stained.

We cannot expect many artists to act as Yuyu and Sixela did. Most will prioritize their livelihood over political speech, and so will do little more than gather gratefully in the DMs of a vocal minority. But entities, platforms, or institutions won’t risk their public stature for a political cause, either. Hell, look at me! This very essay desperately avoids any specific political leaning. Everything I say is intentionally milquetoast and anti-inflammatory. In some ways, that does make me a cretin. But it’s also vital if this essay is going to actually reach anyone. And I don’t have the grandiose stature that immunizes a massive artist like XCOPY or Beeple to career suffering when the former posts something like this:

Or when the latter publishes artwork like these:

The rest of us must really consider the consequences of our speech. As Hamlet spake, “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.”

Let’s view high-profile collectors, and their supposed oppressive actions, through this same empathetic lens. These people have families, day-jobs, ambitions, relationships and professional connections, and while their political speech may not prove career suicide, it will engender the same violent DMs, the same tarnished relationships, the same stink of politicization, whichever way their politics orient. If I were one of these collectors or influencers, ever-present at galas, conferences, museum shows, gallery openings, exclusive parties and dinners, if I were hobnobbing with stars, brokering deals, and getting rich in the process, I wouldn’t want to risk all that either. Is this selfish? Sure. Harmful? I can see that. Odious? You could convince me. But would I do the same? God damn it, I bet I would. Wouldn’t you? Can we remove our shrouds of virtue for a moment and admit as much, at least to ourselves?

Do you see how this is all a vicious cycle?

Artists are afraid of retribution from collectors, which would harm their career, so they remain quiet.

Platforms are afraid of backlash (for going too far on one hand, not going far enough on the other) and/or tarnishing vital relationships with collectors and sponsors.

Collectors are afraid of ruining their privileged status with artists, financiers, or gallerists, leaving them unable to continue working in this space.

It’s fear, it’s all fear.

While I do not think these collectors are necessarily evil for their suppressive silence, while I believe fully that collectors have every right to avoid artists whom they morally disagree, that they deserve agency about what to collect, which artists to amplify, and where to place their time and energy and investment, there are still tragic consequences to their actions (or lack thereof).

And the consequence is that crypto art has necrotized itself. Unfortunately, empathy does not change reality. And now we all — the collectors and influencers especially — must reckon with the suffocating reality their silence has shaped.

IV. The Forever Ceasefire

We can essentially aggregate crypto art into a small smattering of styles:

1. Cutting-edge technical processes a la Matt Kane, Ix Shells, Pindar van Arman, Emi Kusano, Linda Dounia
2. Generative art like that stuffed inside ArtBlocks[500]
3. The deepening evolution of characters and iconography: Sam Spratt, Otherworld, Paul Reid
4. Hyper-personal narrativization, a style dominated by photographers like Cath Simard and Summer Wagner, or Claire Silver and Diewiththemostlikes
5. The pop-art cartoonishness populating the oeuvres of Bryan Brinkman, Vexx, Aleqth, or AllSeeingSeneca
6. Internal references to crypto culture, exemplified by XCOPY and Trevor Jones, for example.

Barring a few exceptions, crypto art fits neatly into these buckets. Now let me be clear: this art is wonderful. I have nothing negative to say about these artists, all pioneering in their aesthetics, their community-building, their lore, their technical brilliance, etc. Please do not mistake my forthcoming comments for individual criticism.

But nothing these styles interrogate — technology, internal experience, human universalism, our niche milieu, the creation of iconography — is controversial or confrontational. All are easily digested and thus treated as widely marketable.

The proliferation of such “friendly” art is not negative in a vacuum, but it’s strange considering this movement’s origins. MOCA’s Genesis Collection contains a host of overtly-political and inflammatory work from before crypto art’s 2021 hyper-popularization. Josie Bellini’s Looks like you’ve had a bit too much to think — #14/21 (2020), Carlos Marcial’s The Memorial (2020), Helicopter Money (2020) by Prometheus, all were released into a world where cryptocurrency was still considered dangerous, dirty, fringe, frightening. Bitcoin’s anti-fiat, anti-bank, anti-establishment ideology was, by nature, antagonistic and anti-authoritarian. Crypto art reflected that. Our entire ecosystem was extremist, and so were its ideas and contributions. Crypto art attracted fringe creatives with fringe beliefs. There was no punishment for extreme or controversial artwork because the very existence of crypto art was extreme and controversial. Perhaps the end of that era, and the rise of a sterilized crypto art, was foreshadowed when SuperRare, fearing a copyright lawsuit, infamously removed ROBNESS from their platform for minting his plagiarized-and-remixed NFT of a garbage can, 64-Gallon Toter (2020). Perhaps that was when economic necessity first outweighed free expression.

As one of crypto art’s longest-tenured and most celebrated artists, Trevor Jones’ “earlier NFT work was clearly anti-bank and anti-establishment,” in his own words, often confronting politicians and world leaders and global conflict. “But honestly,” he told me, “As I’ve grown in my career, I’ve become more interested in exploring the human condition: themes that connect across race, religion, gender, or sexuality. That’s what excites me, not pushing a political line.”

His is a noble attitude, even spiritually pure. And certainly, if the art currently characterizing crypto art serves as an example, it’s fairly ubiquitous.

But it was not made ubiquitous accidentally. Collector activity — especially when that activity brings life-changing economic circumstances — steers artistic output. Today’s notable collectors act like individual corporations. Fearing legal action, public disdain, or loss of mainstream cultural capital, they calculate their conduct according to controversy. Less controversy equals more marketability. Full stop. This is not a problem exclusive to crypto art, either. Many of the world’s most prolific artists have had their complexities scrubbed-away and their achievements reduced to marketable iconography. Takashi Murakami is lionized for his over-merchandized flowers, while his ultra-provocative sculptures, like My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), are absent from public awareness. Damian Hirst preserved a dead tiger shark in a formalin-filled display case, but somehow it’s his innocuous polka dots which are most widely-known. Of all the insane variety of digital art available, it was Refik Anadol’s “Glorified Lava Lamp” selected for display at the Museum of Modern Art. Innocuousness and uniformity are inoffensive, and therefore safe, and thus predictable, and naturally preferable to investors, institutions, and public figures seeking universal approval.

All of which is fine for a coffee shop but is death to an art movement.

Crypto art today does not meet audiences in the street but demands we come into galleries and shut the door behind us. Most people are not going to know an artist’s lore, or possess uncommon technical expertise, or understand niche references to crypto culture. They cannot possibly connect with crypto art when so much of it demands that level of awareness or investment. I’ve shown plenty of XCOPY artworks to non-NFT people before, for example. XCOPY artworks worth seven-figures, easy. XCOPY artworks deemed culturally-valuable beyond measure.

Responses range from “Cool” to “Why are you showing me this?”

Because into their world, the actual world, this art does not tread.

Theirs — ours! — is like it or not, a world of politicization. It is a world of economic anxiety, social degradation, warfare, suffering, and all the other horrors forced upon us by Twitter and the 10’o-clock news. It is a world of fear and loathing, escapism, mental illness, drone strikes, incels, wildfires, moral equivocation, lobbed allegations and lobbed grenades. Not always, of course, and not all of it, but to deny this world’s reality — as the collective mass of crypto art does — is to deny our experience of existing within it.

Deep introspection, universalism, self-reflection, the endless search for beauty, all of this is absolutely necessary, the jungle-gyms of genius. But we are boiling in a stew of murders, invasions, and economic contractions. Ours are not surface-level concerns to be diminished or brushed-off as inconsequential just because they are not universal or divine. We don’t need genius, we need to be seen. Every time a coffee shop, an “immersive experience,” an artwork, a top-grossing movie, a number one charting-album refuses to meet us in our crumbling milieu, our motivation to engage crumbles too. Oftentimes, the world we live in, and the one we see reflected in culture, appear to be two entirely different places.

It is okay for a mega-corporation like Disney to sell escapism to the public. But an art movement must aim to be more.

Crypto art has become just another anesthetized cultural arena with a fed-up, dwindling audience. People are outraged, and they want art that reflects their outrage. Their pain. Their confusion. Them. And crypto art can’t do that when its attempts to approach real people in the real world are crushed like saplings beneath a bulldozer. Audiences will go elsewhere. They have already. The few of us that still care are finding less and less reason to continue doing so. That doesn’t mean we don’t believe in crypto art. How many hundreds-of-thousands of words do I have to write before my belief is codified as fact? It just means we see crypto art for what it is, and despite our absolute best attempts, we do not like it.

We are uninterested in community-building experiments. We do not beg the heavens for PFPs and cute characters and concertos and cutting-edge programming. There is civil war in Sudan. There are shootings in American schools daily. Young people aren’t having sex, can’t buy houses, don’t have friends, spin ever-deeper into a whirlpool of online vitriol and joblessness and brainrot. Is it too much to ask that these experiences are reflected in our art?

Maybe you look at past art movements and think this political disengagement is common. Pop Art, for example. Well, Warhol jeered the sacred likeness of Mao Tzedong in his screen-prints, and Keith Haring paired his uncontroversial aesthetics with hyper-controversial activism for AIDS victims and anti-apartheid movements. Okay, what about Impressionism? Surely all of those innocuous landscapes couldn’t be considered political? Yeah, except Impressionism forced representations of normal people, non-heroes, laborers, and the penniless onto a French art world where artistry — controlled by the Académie des Beaux-Arts — was required by rule to limit itself to heroes and tales from antiquity. Abstract Expressionism, then? As many articles (from ArtForum, the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, and the Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art) discuss, the notion of total aesthetic freedom was revolutionary in a Cold-War-clutched world, the West wrangling with McCarthyism while dissent was snuffed-out by secret police behind the Iron Curtain.

So unless I’m missing something crucial, unless I’m a much less-insightful analyst of this movement than I’d believed, then crypto art is fairly unique in the artistic continuum for its overt and avowed avoidance of politics.

Simply put, collectors are to blame for a lot of this. These are the power brokers in crypto art, and they have consistently used their power to elevate what’s marketable while disincentivizing anything halfway controversial. Worse still, they found a space borne from diametrically-opposite views and spent years smelting it down into something antithetical to what it originally was. These collectors need to realize what they’ve done to a crypto art they claim (and claim, and claim) to steward.

Admittedly, I take these people at their word. I think most really are interested in crypto art’s uplift. And so, if any of you have made it this far, I speak to you now directly:

What do you want the legacy of this movement to be? Do you really believe this art is revolutionary, as you so often boast, or do you just enjoy being surrounded by a haram of lesser Warhols who don’t mind that you make off with their spoils? Your answer to these things can be yes, but just be honest about your intentions. With us. With yourself.

At the beginning, revolutionaries and renegades really did predominate here. No middlemen, no gatekeepers, creator royalties and full decentralization. Free expression was not just expected, it was demanded. Look around the space today: do you see any of these values enshrined? Maybe you disagreed with such tenets from the beginning, maybe you found them quixotic, and if that’s the case, it’s tragic that you elevated yourself into a position of prominence here, because this space deserved overseers who echoed its sentiments, and maybe that’s not you, and maybe you know that, and maybe you’re fine with how everything has gone.

But do you really think crypto art can become something of note if it turns away from the raw, roiling world? Do you really think Sam Spratt’s Luci paintings are sufficient-enough objects of worship for future generations? Make the case then. Do you really think Alpha Centauri Kid’s skull-piano performance is worthy of the historical record? Tell me what you see in this art that I, and so many of us, do not? Help me understand. Please. Prove that you know what you’re doing.

You could have purchased a piece from the Art for Humanity auction, you could have lent a retweet for bravery’s sake alone, and in doing so, in doing just that, encouraged a host of artists — whether you agreed with their politics or not — to continue forging an unprotected path in this dark wood. Is that not exciting enough? Does that not inspire you? You could have done something, you could have done anything. But you didn’t, maybe because you were scared, maybe because you were disinterested, and now I have to write this whole essay so that you’ll pay attention to the consequences.

I see you! I sympathize with you! I understand you, I am you, and I fault you for very little (the liking tweets thing is really weird though). But look, really look, at what crypto art has become under your care. Is this the crypto art you envisioned, this collection of inoffensive furniture, smartly-arranged? Is this all that you think crypto art can be?

It can be so much more. I swear it can. Can’t you see that, too?