Meet Victor Langlois, the 19-year-old NFT phenomenon whose artwork is now valued at more than $26 million!
In December 2020, Victor Langlois sold stickers and prints through his Twitter account for $5 each. A little over a year later, he’s taking the digital art world by storm.
The Seattle-based artist, known online as FEWOCiOUS, has always found refuge in his work, but he says his family did not encourage him to pursue an art career.
Langlois was raised by his grandmother, who moved to America from El Salvador, and ‘had three jobs and four kids, a single mother. And I think she struggled so much that she just wanted security,’ says Victor Langlois.
She said, she was like, “What? Be a lawyer?” Which I understand. But she said, “Your art is ugly, and that’s why you can’t do it.”
A digitally native artist, Langlois sees this as a moment for his generation. ‘A painter can sell a painting for thousands of dollars, but a digital artist never had that.
Maybe you get a good commission for some company or from some musician, but never really respected for just the digital craft itself. NFTs are giving digital artists that same platform.’
At approximately 10:00 AM EST time on June 23, 2021, the website for Christie’s, the legendary auction house, did something it had never done before: it crashed.
Buyers flooded the site trying to place bids on a series of NFTs from an up-and-coming digital artist named FEWOCiOUS, and the traffic caused, as Christie’s put it, “issues.”
As a result, the auction was called off and rescheduled for two days later—all because a teenager whose speciality is creating paintings that you cannot touch, hold, or hang, broke the system.
FEWOCiOUS, whose real name is Victor Langlois, is one of the most successful and visible members of a growing community of unique crypto artists who are finding success in the modern gold rush that is the NFT market.
If you missed the whole Beeple phenomenon, an NFT is a unique set of digital files stored on a public blockchain and act as proof of ownership for an accompanying digital work.
If you have the NFT of a digital work of art, you have the original. Right now, the buying and selling of NFTs is a multimillion-dollar industry, and Langlois happens to be a bright spot in the middle of it.
Since breaking into the NFT market in 2020, Langlois has earned just under $18 million. His digital artwork The Everlasting Beautiful sold for a staggering $550,000.
Now he is the youngest artist ever to be featured by Christie’s and the first to crash its site—two impressive records.
Known as one of the world’s leading digital artists, the 19-year-old has staged multiple successful solo releases and two groundbreaking NFT space collaborations — with digital fashion brand RTFKT Studios and collaborators Odius Parrot_ism and Jonathan Wolfe — is leading to sales in the millions.