The meme ‘Momo’ is “dead” says original sculptor who destroyed artwork
The Japanese artist who created the unnerving sculpture that was used by Internet pranksters to illustrate the popular Momo meme has told British media that he has since destroyed the artwork.
The original sculpture, called Mother Bird, was created by artist Keisuke Aiso in 2016 and had at the time been displayed in an art gallery in Tokyo. During its time on display, a photo of the creepy sculpture was taken and subsequently found its way online under the name Momo.
And during 2018 and 2019, Internet pranksters began spreading the image attached to many alarmist claims, such as the claim that Momo was real, and those who see the image should contact a number and accept a list of increasingly violent or dangerous tasks.
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This was followed by a series of alarmist and erroneous media headlines that claimed the Momo meme had been linked to various teen suicides across the world, despite police never confirming such.
The meme then escalated quickly during early 2019, and many nonsensical and silly claims began spreading online, fuelled by more lurid media headlines which in turn led to even more online pranksters using the Momo image to scare others.
Of course, the meme began to fade away as quickly as it arrived. And now hopefully the final nail in the coffin for this alarmist craze is the news that the artist who created the original sculpture admitting that it no longer exists.
Sculptor Aiso told The Sun
It was rotten and I threw it away
…
The children can be reassured Momo is dead – she doesn’t exist and the curse is gone.
Aiso also told the media that he felt responsible for scaring children online and for the way his artwork had been exploited.
But he also ceded that his work was meant to scare people, albeit not in that way. ‘Mother Bird’ was based on an old Japanese ghost story of a woman who died during childbirth only to emerge as a bird woman hybrid to haunt the area where she had died.
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The whole incident demonstrates the Internet’s ability to turn creepy online memes into full blown panic inducing crazes that – at its peak – involved warnings from dozens of police forces, notices from schools and countless alarmist media headlines.
We wrote this article about how parents (and indeed anyone else) can handle these types of alarmist crazes in the future without adding fuel to the fire, which we recommend giving a read.