In 2020, Trash Art (in its original form) exposed the cracks forming in cryptoart’s ideals as power and influence on SuperRare began to gatekeep artistic expression.

And while remix culture eventually became an undeniable cornerstone of Web3, a major win, other key aspects like royalties, resistance to gatekeeping, and independence from financial influence continued to erode its foundation.

As Marco Peyfuss (@mpeyfuss), founder and CTO of Transient Labs, recently put it in a post on X, “We lost the plot on cryptoart somewhere in the last two years. Losing royalties, coins, rug pulls, and more have driven away many creators. This is not the future I imagined four years ago.”

Increased centralization through influential lists, curators, traditional museums, and galleries pushed the space further away from its original ethos, all sacrificed in the name of greed. Similarly, Trash Art itself became a hollow reflection of what it once was, and the Toter meme lost its original significance.

What began as a challenge to gatekeeping and a statement on decentralization gradually became a symbol of rebellion for its own sake. Instead of pushing meaningful conversations forward, #trashart became a badge of outsider status, embraced more for its defiance than for the ideas it once stood for.

Even Robness, the godfather of Trash Art, seems to evoke a call for a return to what once was. In a recent post, he described what he calls "Mental Aroma," the indescribable feeling tied to a particular moment in time, a sense of being on the verge of something great before knowing exactly what it was.

"A lot of cryptoartists during 2019 were on the verge of some great happening, but we all didn't know exactly what it was. It’s an entire encapsulation of the human experience, so powerful that one cannot actually point to a specific thing during that time that made us feel such a way." – @robnessofficial

That feeling, that raw energy of cryptoart’s early days, is slipping away. The question is, can we get it back?

Anon collector, @omz_nft, on the Collector's Call podcast, believes we can. He believes we can revisit and restore meaningful aspects of cryptoart with a renewed perspective. He believes we can reclaim its values in parallel with the broader Web3 art community.

But the same forces that once threatened Trash Art now now loom over the entire space. if we fail to recognize what's happening, history will repeat itself. Trash Art, once a movement of defiance, now stands as a fading warning sign, a reminder of what happens when a movement strays too far from its foundations.

If we don’t course-correct, cryptoart risks becoming just another co-opted trend, stripped of its original meaning. Let Trash Art’s transformation into a simulacrum be the lesson we refuse to ignore.