Victoria Misu brings fine art to life on TikTok
Victoria Misu brings fine art to life on TikTok
When you first get on TikTok, it can be a little jarring. It’s all college students doing stupid things, mommy bloggers dancing with their kids, and videos about what’s going on in Ukraine. It takes a minute to settle into your unique TikTok pocket—and you really have to train the algorithm to get there.
I still feel anxious scrolling through my feed—I have to decide in a split second whether I will reject or watch each video as the algorithm hones in on what it should show me—but slowly, TikTok has agreed that what I love is Broadway musicals and BookTok and fine art. And that’s how I found Victoria Misu.
Victoria is a visual artist who creates performance art for TikTok and Instagram. With 120k and 140k followers respectively, and more than a million likes, she has reinvented fine art for modern mediums, creating masterpieces for a digital age while using the forums to master her craft in public—I was instantly smitten.
Her piece “the girl who found her pearl earring” is a reenactment of Johannes Vermeer’s 16th century painting The Girl with a Pearl Earring and was her first foray into TikTok, receiving 575,500 views and comments like “this deserves to be projected in the MoMA.” Another of my favorites is “midnight magic,” a haunting vignette that tells a whole story between flickers of candlelight and dabs of perfume.
Victoria works in VR, but she moonlights in visual media—and has found social media to be the perfect outlet for her art. Here is our conversation in full.