A young girl who became an internet sensation after a picture of her ended up as popular viral memes is now selling the original image. She aims to make thousands of dollars at auction.
Chloe Clem, now aged 10, became a hit at the age of two when her mother videoed her reaction to a surprise trip to Disneyland in 2013. The unimpressed look on her face sparked the image’s use as a meme for people expressing concern.
The image will sell as a non-fungible token (NFT). This is a way for people to own the original digital picture, providing them with a digital certificate of ownership for the piece. NFT allows the sale of original versions of popular online content as if they were physical pieces of art.
The artist may retain copyright of their work, so are able to continue producing and selling copies of it, but the buyer owns the “original”. People liken it to owning an autographed print, where collector value “bragging rights” of ownership of the original.
Becoming an internet sensation
Chloe’s mother Katie uploaded a video of her daughters reacting to a surprise Disneyland trip in September 2013. Chloe’s sister Lily began crying. The camera then panned over to Chloe making “her cute little buck-toothed side-eye face”. “The internet did the rest,” Katie adds.
The video has received over 20 million views, while the image of Chloe became an internet sensation. Her mother recalls how she opened up Tumblr to find “pages and pages of Chloe’s face”. It describes it as “weird” and “overwhelming” to have everyone sending her memes of her daughter. She still receives memes from friends and family who see Chloe on the internet.
It didn’t take long for Buzzfeed to declare Chloe “the queen and goddess of the internet” and “the patron saint of Tumblr”.
The family from Utah have decided to auction the image off as an NFT, with bids starting at 5 Ethereum. This is a type of cryptocurrency worth around $15,000 (£11,000). After learning of the NFT market, Chloe’s mother states the decision to sell is a “no brainer”. She sees it as a “cool opportunity” for a “Chloe fan” to actually own the meme. Chloe thinks the idea is “pretty cool” too.
A booming market for digital art ownership rights
Following a number of recent multi-million-dollar NFT sales, the market for ownership rights to digital art has exploded.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first ever tweet in March to a Malaysian businessman, netting himself the equivalent of $2.9m. A month later, a woman featuring in Disaster Girl meme made $500,000 from her sale. While an image called the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme sold for $411,000.
However, in August, a hacker tricked a fan of graffiti artist Banksy into buying a fake NFT off the artist’s website. Luckily, the hacker has returned most of the over $336,000 he paid.
Ms Clem says that she will use money from the sale to help pay for her daughter’s education, as she’d “just like to put her through college”. Although Chloe has other ideas for the money, saying she wants to buy a horse or use it to build a Disney World.
The young girl has amassed more than 500,000 followers on Instagram, and featured in a Google advert in Brazil. The meme has enabled the family to do some “amazing things”, but at the end of the day, Ms Clem says shes “just a stay at home mom with my girls”.
Thank you for reading Viral memes: ‘Side-eyeing Chloe’ to sell iconic image as NFT
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