"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Since 2017, I’ve been saying out loud what many artists have whispered to me in private—things they agree with, but don’t dare voice themselves. I get it. The consequences of speaking up have been made painfully clear to some of us. But somewhere along the way, first principles got flipped upside down.
Much like Mufasa warning Simba about the shadowlands, most artists now know exactly where not to venture—and these days, that “off-limits” zone covers almost everything. The twist? In our version, Scar is the one defining the shadowlands. It’s scorched earth disguised as safety, keeping people from discovering where the real lush jungle is.
Choosing the artist’s path is already a lunatic bet. It will almost certainly wreck you financially—often taking your health, relationships, and sleep schedule down with it. Your diet will consist mainly of cortisol and hope. And now, the path is lined with incentives to stay silent about the agendas that have put the entire realm in chains.
Artists are guarding their own downfall, selling out the soul of why we create just to appease people who couldn’t care less about us. We’re not going to see mass adoption of this space until both the woke performance act and the pure day-trader mentality stop holding it hostage.
The good news? We could flip it almost overnight—by each of us actually doing us.
That’s when the scoreboard changes—not to likes or floor prices, but to something far more dangerous to mediocrity: astonishing art, undeniable skill, uncompromising vision, and actual value to the world. Maybe this way, it’s not the silence we all remember, but the beautiful variety of voices in support of making the world more astonishing—in a completely individual, decentralized, yet harmonized-in-the-big-picture way.
Work: The Pretenders
1/1 on Series: ”Things You Think and Believe but Can’t Say Inside the Arts"
Comes with a physical signed print if the collector is willing to pay cost + postal
