Street artist Winston Tseng was behind an anti-Elon Musk ad that led to a viral frenzy when it was installed various in sidewalk ad spaces within a mile of the White House two weeks ago. The ad, satirically attributed to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), read “Help Eliminate Elon” and featured a large red X crossing over an illustration of Musk doing the Nazi salute.
“In the spirit of transparency, I should disclose that USAID paid me $69M (in condoms) for this ad,” Tseng said in an email to Hyperallergic, riffing on Musk’s misunderstanding of the US’s provisions for international HIV prevention and treatment.
Tseng’s use of the USAID logo was apparently convincing enough for thousands online to chime in, including North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who shared a video of himself in front of the fake ad in a “government advertising box” at 400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, lambasting it for “targeting individuals” and saying “it better not be funded by [USAID] or endorsed by them!”
“The president is asking serious questions about where taxpayer dollars are going, and whether or not it’s the best and highest use,” Tillis continued, lauding Musk and Trump for “doing right by those taxpayers.”
Tillis’s post amassed over 74,000 likes on X and prompted some 6,000 user comments ranging from concern for Musk’s safety and calling for legal action to lambasting the ad as another example of “wasting our money.”
Tillis’s response was nothing out of the ordinary for Tseng, who noted that he thinks “most of the outrage is performative, and people don’t actually care once they realize it’s just a random artist’s work.”
“They’d rather pretend it’s from ‘the evil Democrats’ or ‘the deep state,’” he continued. “Right-wing influencers and media outlets tend to use my work to engagement farm, and that’s all Senator Tillis is trying to do, too. My work tends to attract that increased enthusiasm and rage.”
The artist has a long history of parody ad campaigns and wheatpastings satirizing current events and societal issues. No entity is off-limits, either — he’s used luxury and retail brands, the Christian church, sports teams, Netflix, Airbnb, BlueSky, McDonald’s, PornHub, Planned Parenthood, Target, and even Sesame Street as vehicles for his political punchlines.
“The ad takeovers in commercial spaces usually only last a few days or so, but there have been some that have stayed up for weeks somehow,” Tseng explained. “Wheatpasted ones can be even shorter lived, generally less than a day.”
All of that to say, not only has the ad been removed from the 400 Massachusetts Avenue NW spot, but the entire structure itself is now gone.
