Back in October, 26-year old British artist and taxidermist Adele Morse sold her badly mangled fox on eBay for 330 pounds ($536, or 16,000 Russian rubles). The fox died of natural causes, and the job wasn't perfect... but he has character, Morse wrote in the eBay post, complete with multiple photographs of the failed attempt.
Soon after, Morse
found her inbox flooded with messages from Russia. Her old side project had become an Internet celebrity and meme almost over night, now known as the "drug-addicted (or Stoned) Fox."
As the Russian news broadcast below explains, the Stoned Fox has ripped the Russian Internet (specifically the Russian social network RuNet) apart, with the newspaper Metro even declaring it
the winner of the Internet in 2012.
Besides the
hundreds of Photoshopped photos now populating the Russian Internet, Stoned Fox has
made his way to YouTube, where he rides the properly
taxidermied Cat Copter, the
pixelated poptart kitty known as Nyan Cat, or barks
like a dog barking like a chicken.
Even the press secretary for Russian politician Alexei Navalny, Anna Veduta, is a fan of the Stoned Fox, as
a photo of her wearing it on a t-shirt caused a mini-press scandal in late November.
Months later, students at
Moscow State University are now raising money to fly Morse to Moscow as well as buy the original Stoned Fox for a Stoned Fox meme exhibit in the Center for Contemporary Art "Winery" wing in 2013. So far, students have
raised 25,000 rubles for the project, which has gained national interest.
Meanwhile, the buyer of the actual Stoned Fox is
now asking for 40,000 rubles ($1,326) - which is a bargain considering some are calling the Stoned Fox a national treasure.
