A meme 12 years in the making (!?). In 2008, we exhibited an installation using 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 be exhibited again as a physical object.
Our plan was for the photograph to take on a life of its own as a meme, allowing the sculpture to exist only through the countless versions people might create and share online. But no matter how much we tried to push it, the image just didn’t take off. It never “went viral.” After a year of trying, we gave up and chalked it up as a complete failure.
Then, twelve years later, in 2020, we discovered something unexpected: the image had become a meme after all. It was everywhere—circulating across a wild range of contexts like TV shows, politics, music, sports, and manga—often tagged with the phrase “Mickey is Died” [sic].
Anonymous users had made thousands of variations, tweaking it in all sorts of ways: cropping it, flipping it, adding jokes, slapping on new graphics and replacing what was on the TV screen. Some of the references were easy to catch, others were completely cryptic.
Here are a few examples:
