As President Obama arrives in Los Angeles for his $32,000 per plate fundraiser at the home of Shonda Rhimes this week, a local street artist is pointing out the irony of the producer of the hit TV show Scandal, a show about a Washington public relations firm that specializes in managing political scandals, hosting the producer of such actual scandals as the cover-up surrounding the Benghazi attack, the lost hard-drives of IRS officials targeting conservatives, and the Fast and Furious gun running scheme. Posters went up Monday night all over Hollywood around Rhimes's Hancock Park home and the Sunset Gower Studios where Scandal is filmed.
The posters feature a modified version of the Scandal logo, which now reads “Scandals” and a quote from Rhimes's infamous commencement speech at Dartmouth where she urged graduates, “Don’t be an asshole.” The artist added a hashtag to the epithet in a seeming nod to another part of Rhimes's speech in which the producer called out online social movements like Michelle Obama's #SaveOurGirls as being faux-activism. “A hashtag is not a movement,” Rhimes declared.
This is not the first time that Los Angeles street artists have spoken truth-to-power. In May, posters illuminated bus shelters in Century City lampooning Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan with Obama silhouetted against a sky between two teleprompters. On April 15, inflatable IRS Death Stars appeared in front of the Westwood Federal Building and the IRS headquarters in downtown Los Angeles highlighting the current public sentiment for the scandal-embroiled institution.
