A meme 12 years in the making (!?). In 2008, we exhibited an installation featuring a giant Mickey Mouse plush toy, a television, an armchair, a cabinet, a carpet, and a rope. The idea was for it to be photographed and then destroyed—so it could never again be exhibited as a physical object.
Our plan was for the photograph to become a meme, allowing the sculpture to live on only through the countless versions people would eventually create and share online. But no matter how much we tried to push it, the image never took off. It didn’t “go viral.” After a year of trying, we gave up and chalked it up as a failure.
Then, twelve years later, in 2020, something unexpected happened: the image had become a meme after all. It was everywhere—circulating across an astonishing range of contexts, from TV shows and politics to music, sports, and manga—often tagged with the phrase “Mickey is Died” [sic].
Anonymous users had created thousands of variations, altering it in every imaginable way: cropping, flipping, adding jokes, slapping on new graphics, or replacing what appeared on the TV screen. Here are a few examples:
Installed at Madre Museum, Nalpes.