SEBS Skewers Seductive Techniques of Consumer Ad Language in Portugal

Whether it’s the sarcastic stickers from MAD Magazine for Snarlamint cigarettes, Wacky Package trading cards for Crust toothpaste, or that first Saturday Night Live ad for Loggs, the pantyhose for tree-stumps, artists have been lampooning the misleading advertising culture that has fed rampant mindless consumerism for decades.

Early Street Art activists like the Billboard Liberation Front skewered cigarette makers for tying rustic masculinity to cancer-causing tobacco and Ron English liberated a number of billboards by making a humorous and direct link between fast food, children’s morning cereal and chronic obesity – eventually producing toys of commercial mascots in porcine proportions.

SEBS. Amadora, Portugal. July 2018. (photo © SEBS)

In the same spirit we find a few new satiric advertisements today by Street Artist SEBS, who created these colorful attacks on city walls in Loures City and Amodora City not far from Lisbon, Portugal.

“This work is a continuation of the ‘Slaves ‘R’ Us’ campaign that I have been doing,” he tells us. His particular targets this time are fat-free potato chips, the slowly creeping practice of the implantation of RFID electronic chips in people, and a slot machine where you play to win a disease.