This meme began as a photo from one of Eva and Franco Mattes’ installations, a project 12 years in the making—though not quite as intended. In 2008, the artists created an installation featuring a large Mickey Mouse plush toy, a television, an armchair, a cabinet, a rug, and a rope. The setup was photographed and then destroyed, ensuring it could never be exhibited as a physical object again.
The concept was to transform the photograph into a meme, allowing the sculpture to live on only through countless reinterpretations online. Despite their efforts, the image failed to gain traction and “go viral.” After a year, the artists gave up, deeming the project a complete failure.
However, in 2020—12 years later—Eva and Franco Mattes discovered that the image had, in fact, become a widely circulated meme. Variations appeared across diverse platforms and communities: in TV shows, sports contexts, horror themes, and comics. Often tagged with the misspelled caption “Mickey Mouse is Died,” anonymous creators had reworked the image thousands of times. They cropped it, flipped it, added jokes, inserted graphics, replaced the screenshot on the TV, and adapted it into numerous meme formats.
What once seemed like a failure had quietly evolved into an unexpected phenomenon.
