“My original plan was to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that changed when my social media blew up,” Labuzzetta, 19, said. Requests from some 10,000 potential buyers flooded his inbox in one day. But it was a work honoring the basketball player Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna after their deaths in a helicopter crash that gained traction - more than 29 million views across four videos. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, Ben Labuzzetta joined TikTok during his senior year of high school, sharing paintings of celebrities like Billie Eilish and Morgan Freeman. What happens when viewership plummets, copycats encroach and fans start dictating an artist’s taste? Fortunes can suddenly fizzle.

When a minute-long video can attract fame and fortune, is it any surprise that young artists are bypassing art schools and student loans, quitting their survival jobs and pursuing careers as full-time artists on TikTok? But the app’s insatiable demand for content is also bending their aesthetics in unexpected ways. But platform creators like Chessco are building their businesses big time, courting viewers as street artists once did on Instagram nearly a decade ago. Most galleries have shown little interest in finding their next big star there, and critics have eschewed its surfeit of amateurish neon-pop paintings that are more like street art. Chessco’s audience clicked in appreciation of his Warhol-inspired aesthetic and how often he choreographed the creation of his works to music ranging from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” to the rapper 6ix9ine’s “Gooba.” There, his neon-colored portraits of icons like Bob Ross, George Washington and Megan Thee Stallion have garnered more than 2 million fans - a crowd several times larger than the followings of critically acclaimed artists like Jeff Koons and Kehinde Wiley on Instagram.

But when it came time for Chessco to start exhibiting, he logged onto TikTok. Reinventing himself through months of trial and error, he might have taken the conventional route and tried to partner with a gallery to sell his paintings. Although he had rarely touched a paintbrush before, Matthew Chessco found himself reaching toward the canvas to pursue his dreams after quitting a career in mechanical engineering only four days into the job.

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