It was not quite 4 in the afternoon, and Victor Langlois, an 18-year-old cryptoartist, was at his desktop computer, watching a frenzied bidding war between two art collectors. Langlois — known by his art name FEWOCiOUS, or Fewo, to his friends and fans — was dressed in a white hoodie that he had designed, its arms covered in his own psychedelic art, including an eyeball and sunflower afloat in a blue sky. The room’s window had been covered with cardboard to keep things dark, and a string of blue LED lights shone down from the ceiling. As the numbers rose, Langlois nervously pulled his beanie off and on, running his hands through his poofy black hair.
The bidding war began a day earlier, on Feb. 7, on the auction site SuperRare, when an art collector called @thegreatmando1 offered Langlois 15 ETH for his digital painting “The Sailor.” ETH is short for Ether, a cryptocurrency much like Bitcoin. A single unit of Ether can be worth a lot: The day of the auction, 1 ETH was equal to $1, 600. That meant @thegreatmando1 had offered $24, 000 for Langlois’s artwork. But the sum jumped when another bidder, @yeahyeah, offered 18 ETH, or roughly $33, 000. The two bidders pushed the price up and up, until by noon it reached $67, 905.92.
Langlois was initially unaware of this remarkable news. He had slept in, after a long evening hunched over his iPad making more art. He only scrambled to check the bidding when a fellow artist pinged him: “Guess who got a $60, 000 bid?”
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When I dropped by his Seattle home, it was midafternoon, there were two hours left to go and bidding for “The Sailor” was at $75, 000. Langlois was on Twitter talking to other digital artists, who were excitedly cheering him on. “1 HOUR & 30 MINUTES LEFT! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” he posted.
Langlois has an earnest, almost unsettlingly sweet affect; that’s a conscious choice, he told me. (“I decided that because I had this upbringing where people were really mean, I was going to be the nicest person I could be.”) As he watched the bids onscreen, he giggled nervously. “I can’t believe this, ” he said. A year ago, he was a broke high school student, living unhappily in his grandparents’ house in Las Vegas, where his grandmother would peek into his bedroom and, he says, dismiss his huge pile of acrylic paintings and colored-marker drawings as “ugly.”
Because he had been selling his art on websites like SuperRare since the summer before, by New Year’s Day 2021 — the day he turned 18 — Langlois had enough money to move out, and he headed for Seattle. He became a full-time artist; he came out as trans. He rented a house near downtown, which he stocked with art supplies, a Keurig coffee maker and a set of dumbbells (as yet unopened). “My family, they don’t have money, and everyone always had two jobs and lived in terrible parts of California and came from El Salvador, ” he said. Making so much in a day was “just
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Langlois creates surrealist digital pictures and moving images, often grotesque, cartoony portraits — faces with dripping tears and exposed skin — that channel his darker emotions. The work he was selling on the day I visited, “The Sailor, ” depicts a huge-headed figure, its brain exposed like a mound of pink beef; its two eyes look as if they are cut from magazine pictures, a common motif in his portraits, and a paper-boat hat perches jauntily on its head. Langlois drew most of it on his iPad, curled up on the sofa in his living room during his first days in Seattle. Then he used animation software to add motion: The brain gently pulses, the eyes blink and blink. “The Sailor” manages to look both unsettling and whimsical.
Langlois isn’t really selling the digital art, though. He’s selling what’s called a nonfungible token, which to its owners represents a unique relationship with the artist and the art. NFTs are digital files created using blockchain computer code, much like the code that makes Bitcoin possible. Langlois’s NFT contains data that points to a copy of “The Sailor” online, as well as data about who currently owns the NFT. It is essentially impossible to duplicate. That means the NFT behaves — in the eyes of a new breed of collector, anyway — somewhat like a physical piece of art. Someone can own it, keep it or resell it to another collector. Langlois’s animation is online for anyone to see, or even duplicate and download. But there’s only one copy of that NFT.
Lately, NFTs have been the subject of countless spit-take headlines, part of a craze that began in December, when the cryptoartist Beeple sold a group of works for more than $3.5 million. By the spring, a dizzying array of digital files — video clips of LeBron James dunking, Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, the “disaster girl” meme — were being minted into NFTs and auctioned off for hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars. The New York Times itself has participated in the craze: Its technology reporter Kevin Roose created an NFT out of one his columns and auctioned it for a sum worth, on the day of its sale, about $560, 000, with the proceeds going to charity.
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No one quite agrees on what this gold rush means. If you ask hard-core champions of Bitcoin — the often-libertarian “crypto natives, ” as they call themselves — NFTs presage the future of digital property. They’re a glimpse at a coming day when people spend their income on digital items they can trade, resell or hoard as an investment; when government will lose its unique power to mint currency and protect property, because people will instead trust the implacable math of blockchain networks. But there are abundant risks and downsides in this NFT vision, most notably environmental costs. The network Ether runs on requires vast amounts of energy, roughly the same amount per year as Hungary, by one estimate. NFT skeptics also regard the scene as yet more crypto zealotry meant primarily just to keep people talking about cryptocurrencies so that Ether and Bitcoin prices stay high. It looks to them like more empty speculation, the next phase in the decades-long financialization of everything.
Since the mania touched off six months ago, the beneficiaries of this anything-goes proliferation of NFTs are, increasingly, people who are already winners in the modern attention economy, from traditional celebrities and brands to everyday people retailing a meme that generated billions of clicks and bursts of fame. Paris Hilton sold a series of NFTs of digital images for more than $1 million; the Golden State Warriors auctioned off NFTs of a collection of digital memorabilia; the guy who snapped the infamous picture of a cheese sandwich from the Fyre Festival is selling an NFT of his tweet with the image to pay for a kidney transplant.
Cryptoartists like Langlois, though, were the ones who kick-started this boom — a strange provenance for a trend that seems to be tipping the cultural economy on its head. As recently as last year, cryptoart was a subcultural vanguard, maybe even a school of sorts, in which the aesthetic of the work being sold (love it or hate it) was in dialogue with the unusual method of selling it. And it was SuperRare and a handful of other sites that created the market, gradually persuading the mostly young, highly online cryptocurrency millionaires to open their virtual wallets and lay out huge sums for digital tokens.
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For those artists, the sudden riches can be life-rattling. By the time I first met with Langlois, in January, his digital sales had already reached $300, 000. And while Langlois is one of the breakout stars in his world, scores of other digital artists — formerly broke or hustling commissions for website design — have also begun to make a living from their art. The question of whether NFTs endure or end up as a 21st-century version of tulip mania means a lot more to these artists and their unusual sensibility than it does to the art world and other institutions that have edged into this speculative frenzy.
Back in his darkened chamber, Langlois was monitoring his auctions. In addition to “The Sailor” on SuperRare, he had three other works for sale on the website Bitski, in limited editions. Their prices were rising, too.
In the last few minutes before the 5 p.m. deadline, @yeahyeah swooped in with a winning bid of 46 ETH, or about $80, 0000, for “The Sailor.” “I’m gonna faaaai-nt, ” Langlois chanted, in a singsongy voice. He wrote a long direct message to @yeahyeah thanking him, then clicked the button on SuperRare to transfer “The Sailor” over to @yeahyeah’s digital wallet.
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Langlois leaned back in his chair and took stock of his day. When his sales on Bitski, totaling almost $29, 000, were added to the proceeds from “The Sailor, ” he had brought in just over $109,
No one quite agrees on what this gold rush means. If you ask hard-core champions of Bitcoin — the often-libertarian “crypto natives, ” as they call themselves — NFTs presage the future of digital property. They’re a glimpse at a coming day when people spend their income on digital items they can trade, resell or hoard as an investment; when government will lose its unique power to mint currency and protect property, because people will instead trust the implacable math of blockchain networks. But there are abundant risks and downsides in this NFT vision, most notably environmental costs. The network Ether runs on requires vast amounts of energy, roughly the same amount per year as Hungary, by one estimate. NFT skeptics also regard the scene as yet more crypto zealotry meant primarily just to keep people talking about cryptocurrencies so that Ether and Bitcoin prices stay high. It looks to them like more empty speculation, the next phase in the decades-long financialization of everything.
Since the mania touched off six months ago, the beneficiaries of this anything-goes proliferation of NFTs are, increasingly, people who are already winners in the modern attention economy, from traditional celebrities and brands to everyday people retailing a meme that generated billions of clicks and bursts of fame. Paris Hilton sold a series of NFTs of digital images for more than $1 million; the Golden State Warriors auctioned off NFTs of a collection of digital memorabilia; the guy who snapped the infamous picture of a cheese sandwich from the Fyre Festival is selling an NFT of his tweet with the image to pay for a kidney transplant.
Cryptoartists like Langlois, though, were the ones who kick-started this boom — a strange provenance for a trend that seems to be tipping the cultural economy on its head. As recently as last year, cryptoart was a subcultural vanguard, maybe even a school of sorts, in which the aesthetic of the work being sold (love it or hate it) was in dialogue with the unusual method of selling it. And it was SuperRare and a handful of other sites that created the market, gradually persuading the mostly young, highly online cryptocurrency millionaires to open their virtual wallets and lay out huge sums for digital tokens.
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For those artists, the sudden riches can be life-rattling. By the time I first met with Langlois, in January, his digital sales had already reached $300, 000. And while Langlois is one of the breakout stars in his world, scores of other digital artists — formerly broke or hustling commissions for website design — have also begun to make a living from their art. The question of whether NFTs endure or end up as a 21st-century version of tulip mania means a lot more to these artists and their unusual sensibility than it does to the art world and other institutions that have edged into this speculative frenzy.
Back in his darkened chamber, Langlois was monitoring his auctions. In addition to “The Sailor” on SuperRare, he had three other works for sale on the website Bitski, in limited editions. Their prices were rising, too.
In the last few minutes before the 5 p.m. deadline, @yeahyeah swooped in with a winning bid of 46 ETH, or about $80, 0000, for “The Sailor.” “I’m gonna faaaai-nt, ” Langlois chanted, in a singsongy voice. He wrote a long direct message to @yeahyeah thanking him, then clicked the button on SuperRare to transfer “The Sailor” over to @yeahyeah’s digital wallet.
With Local Libraries, It's Quality That Matters, Not Quantity
Langlois leaned back in his chair and took stock of his day. When his sales on Bitski, totaling almost $29, 000, were added to the proceeds from “The Sailor, ” he had brought in just over $109,
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