Sotheby’s Has Paused Its Latest NFT Auction After an Artist Withdrew His Work in Protest of the All-Male Line-Up
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Of the 21 glitch artists curated by Sotheby’s, not a single one was female-identifying.
The sale was meant to be the latest lucrative installment from Sotheby’s NFT up-and-coming, Natively Digital, but instead draws renewed attention to the lack of inclusivity in the crypto art space.
Bringing together work by leading glitch artists whose work revel in the aesthetics of distortion and pixelation, the Natively Digital: Glitch-ism auction kicked off two days after the start of a bidding period scheduled to run from March 24th to 31st . Then artist Patrick Amadon withdrew his work, citing the lack of female artists. Within hours, the auction house had halted the “glitch-ism” and promised to rethink and start over.
For Amadon, the crisis of conscience came after he was tagged in a tweet by artist Oona, who wondered how a landmark glitch show could have been curated by a major auction house without involving a single artist. Indeed, a pushback to the all-male auction has been brewing online for some time, albeit largely out of the public spotlight.
XCOPY, Loading new conflict… Redux 6 (2018), one of the works in Glitch-ism, which also included pieces by JakNFT, jakethedegen, Luis Ponce, and neurocolor. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
However, the complaints go far beyond the lack of variety in the sale. In one instance, Dawnia Darkstone, a prominent glitch artist, was asked by the show’s curator Davis Brown to provide an analysis of the glitch art scene, but was denied compensation and denied inclusion on the show. In another case, Rosa Menkman, a Dutch art theorist and glitch art creator, had work that was used without permission in the show’s promotional material. Needless to say, they were not asked to contribute any work for the sale.
“The Sotheby’s sponsored all-male Glitch art show is another example of existing inequality in the art world,” Oona told Artnet News. “Non-male artworks are consistently undervalued and underrepresented. If we don’t acknowledge and address this problem, it will only get worse.”
In response to pressure from Oona and other artists such as Stellabelle and Darkstone, Sotheby’s has pledged to “redress the imbalance in representation within the sale and start fresh at a later date with a more equitable and diverse group of artists”. Part of this effort will include an exhibition and panel event at NFT.NYC, running April 12-14, focused on underrepresented communities of glitch artists.
While appreciating Sotheby’s prompt response and believing the oversight was a “real mistake,” Amadon noted that none of the other show’s artists had followed his lead and stressed the importance of fair representation in the nascent phase of development of the sector.
“Often price becomes the signal factor, but that’s not an honest assessment of quality or importance,” Amadon told Artnet News. “[This] continues the cycle of enriching artists and collectors with privileges and opportunities. Platforms need to be more aware of this and take more responsibility.”
The key to change, Oona says, is asking for higher prices for non-male artists. “For far too long, the link between monetary value and artistic merit has been inseparable from our cultural understanding of art,” Ooma said. “This is not about having all-female shows or tokenism. It’s about achieving true pay and vision parity. It is time non-male artists were given an equal platform to showcase their talents.”
In the revamped Glitch-ism auction, Amadon hopes to see works by artists such as Empress Trash, Stella Particula, Ina Vare, Epic Thundercat, Dawnia Darkstone, Iteration and Wondermundo.
For Amadon it is the second time within a few weeks that he has drawn attention to himself through the social component of his artistic practice. During Hong Kong Art Week, his moving image work No rioters was removed from the giant LED billboard in Causeway Bay shopping district after it was revealed that the piece flashed the names of imprisoned pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.
Sotheby’s declined to give a date for the reissue of Glitch-ism.
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