Gold Trash Bag

About

Gold Trash Bag or Gold Garbage Bag refers to a photograph of a golden trash bag sitting on a pile of black trash bags. The photo documents a 2016 art project in NYC by Ivan Sikic called "Trashed" and was posted to Twitter that year, captioned "when you're trash but you're still better than everyone else." The photo became the subject of further image macros in the following years, typically to show the juxtaposition between something object labeled as "good" on the gold bag and "bad" on the black bags. Several other images of golden trash bags have also become the subject of similar memes.

Origin

In June 2016, artist Ivan Sikic placed gold spray-painted trash bags across New York City as part of an art project titled "Trashed."^[1] On July 31st, Twitter^[2] user @WSHHFANS posted a photograph of one of the bags sitting on top of a number of black trash bags, writing, "When you're trash but you're still better than everyone else," gaining over 7,100 likes and 5,000 retweets in six years (shown below). That day and the next, Sikic made posts about the meme on his Instagram,^[3][4] explaining that he did not take the photograph but showing fascination about its spread.

Spread

The meme gained viral spread over the following months, also inspiring variations. On August 1st, 2016, a Redditor posted the meme to /r/funny,^[5] gaining over 4,500 upvotes in six years. On August 12th, Medium^[8] writer J3k posted a poem based on the image. In 2017, the image was added to Imgflip,^[9] inspiring numerous variations (examples shown below).

On October 25th, 2020, a now-deleted Redditor posted an image macro of a different golden trash bag sitting next to a door to /r/memes,^[7] captioned, "When a comment with -978 downvotes gets an award," gaining over 20,000 upvotes in two years (shown below). On April 11th, 2021, Ivan Sikic uploaded the image to Foundation^[6] as an NFT.

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Various Examples

Search Interest

External References