He spent $25,000 on a bronze Squidward statue before sinking it/ Image: X
If you’ve ever looked at a museum label and wondered how much of archaeology is science and how much is educated guesswork, a Seattle meme artist has now turned that thought experiment into an actual underwater prank. Sunday Nobody, the internet’s reigning king of high-effort absurdity, has sunk a three-metre bronze mash-up of Handsome Squidward and the ancient Greek Discobolus into the Mediterranean, purely to mess with whoever dredges up human history a thousand years from now. And yes, it’s real bronze. And real money. And very much the kind of chaos only the internet could produce.
How a meme artist ended up and sinking a $25,000 statue
Sunday Nobody, 29, has built a whole career on elaborate internet-culture stunts that make absolutely no practical sense, which is precisely why millions love him. He’s the same artist who buried a 3,000-pound Flamin’ Hot Cheetos sarcophagus, created a Bob Ross portrait from 7,104 paint samples, programmed a CNC machine to hand-write the entire Shrek script, built a giant Bee Movie maze, and even set up a (legal) fake-ID vending machine in Brooklyn, among others. His guiding philosophy is simple: when viewers ask why, he asks why not. For this project, he went full academic-chaos mode. He forged a student ID, then consulted a university archaeologist about which materials could survive a millennium underwater. Bronze won. As he explains in his 14-minute YouTube documentary, “I wanted something that could outlast us all without hurting the ocean.” Next came the commission: two full-size, three-metre bronzes cast by China’s Cinuo Sculpture Company for about $4,000 each, plus minis. The design merged two worlds, Myron’s 5th-century BC Discobolus, one of antiquity’s most copied sculptures, and Handsome Squidward, the hyper-chiseled version of the SpongeBob character from the episode “The Two Faces of Squidward,” a meme shorthand for exaggerated self-confidence and dramatic glow-ups. Once the crates arrived, Nobody and a small crew, including his studio hand Nattie and local helpers in Greece, hauled the 500-pound statue to the Halkidiki Peninsula. Floating it offshore on inflatable rafts and even a literal air mattress, they cut the lines and watched it drop 25–30 feet, landing upright by sheer luck. A 25-second GoPro edit later, it went viral, boosted heavily by a December 8, 2025 X repost from @nexta_tv. His rollout also sent ripples beyond the art world. A Solana memecoin inspired by the stunt, $DISCOBOLUS, briefly spiked to a multimillion-dollar market cap after the footage spread, a reminder of how quickly internet spectacle bleeds into crypto hype. Meanwhile, the second bronze statue is up for auction on his site, (last seen at $4,001), and the limited-run mini versions, priced at $500, sold out almost instantly.
What future archaeologists would make of this
He’s upfront about the motive, too. As he put it, the project was simply: “Putting Handsome Squidward’s face from SpongeBob on an ancient Greek statue then sinking it to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea to confuse future archaeologists.” but the internet immediately pointed out the flaw: we now document everything. As one commenter put it, “Nothing will confuse archaeologists of the future. We are literally in the most well-documented era of humankind.” Another added, “Even if the internet vanished, people know what kind of stupid things other people could do.” Still, the joke landed. Users imagined scholars in 3025 trying to decode SpongeBob mythology. One wrote, “Future archaeologists will write entire dissertations on Squidward culture.” Another: “A very expensive use of free will.” The @nexta_tv repost pushed #SquidwardStatue into trending territory, stacking millions of views. The prank also triggered a more serious debate inside archaeology circles: planting fabricated artifacts, even as jokes, can complicate real underwater heritage work. UNESCO guidelines warn against introducing artificial objects that could confuse future surveys or degrade sites. Nobody himself skirts that line; he admits he had no permits, calling it a legal grey area.
But for many viewers, the piece hits a different nerve: how modern culture blends ancient forms with meme logic. It’s a reminder that, in an age where everything is archived, the mystery once baked into archaeology is becoming harder to recreate, even when someone literally sinks a three-metre bronze Squidward in the Mediterranean. Go to Source
