The sale was supposed to be the latest lucrative edition of Sotheby’s NFT outgrowth, Natively Digital, instead it’s drawing renewed attention to the lack of inclusivity in the crypto art space.

The “Natively Digital: Glitch-ism” sale had brought together work from leading glitch artists, whose work revels in the aesthetics of distortion and pixelation, and was two days into a bidding period scheduled to run March 24–31. Then, artist Patrick Amadon withdrew his work citing the sale’s lack of female-identifying artists. Within hours, the auction house had paused “Glitch-ism,” promising to rethink and relaunch.

For Amadon, the crisis of conscience arrived after being tagged in a tweet by artist Oona who questioned how a landmark glitch show could have been curated by a major auction house without including a single female artist. In fact, pushback to the all-male auction had been brewing online for some time, though largely out of the public spotlight.

The complaints, however, go far beyond the sale’s lack of diversity. In one instance, Dawnia Darkstone, a prominent glitch artist, had been asked to provide analysis of the glitch art scene by the show’s curator Davis Brown, but was denied compensation and inclusion in the show. In another, 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 weren’t asked to contribute work for the sale.

“The all-male glitch art show promoted by Sotheby’s is yet another example of the existing disparity in the art world,” Oona told Artnet News. “Non-male artwork is consistently undervalued and underrepresented. If we don’t acknowledge and address this problem, it will only continue to worsen.”

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