Good on Yoko for still being out here creating art that matters!
Some of those people (Lucy Liu under the pseudonym Yu Ling, Ono, Mortensen, and Wood) are even well respected in the art world. The rest? Well, it’s a mixed bag, as work from some of the actors/musicians who are dabbling is…more refined than others. Another factor is that a lot of visual artists side-eye this sort of thing because a lot of these people have the time, resources, and star power that your average artist doesn’t have. There’s a certain amount of resentment as a celebrity has funds for materials and working space, and can contact a dealer and have an art show in a decent gallery complete with press, coverage, etc based on their star power alone, and it’s a really unfair advantage. On the other hand, the art press can be extremely harsh because actors, musicians, and the like are often treated as dilettantes not to be taken seriously; Lucy Liu initially used a pseudonym for a reason.
Recently, two celebrities have had gallery exhibitions with mixed coverage: Adrien Brody and Ed Sheeran. Let’s talk about them both!
Adrien Brody
At his exhibition opening, instead of his art dealer or girlfriend Georgina Chapman Brody opted to bring his mother instead. I’m sorry, but I can’t hate at that.
Brody is no stranger to the art world. His mom (acclaimed Hungarian American photographer Sylvia Placy) and dad Elliot (painter turned educator), made sure he was exposed to the arts at an early age. A pivotal moment which completely changed his life trajectory was when the LaGuardia High School of the Visual and Performing Arts (the school featured in the movie “Fame”) rejected him for their Visual Art program while accepting him into their Drama department. While his claim to fame is primarily acting, his first love seems to be art, and he works primarily in mixed media and collage. Ten years ago he debuted his work at Art Basel Miami, and since then he’s been working steadily on his large format collages when not acting. Recently, his solo exhibition “Made in America” at Eden Gallery in Manhattan raised a lot of eyebrows for different reasons, both in the art press and on social media.
Chewing gum is provided to visitors to Brody’s show, and one of the works encourages visitors to place their chewed gum on it in what the exhibition text calls an “interactive expression of rebellion and decay.” I cannot.
In “Made in America,” many works feature a cartoon — Lisa Simpson or Yosemite Sam or Bugs Bunny — brandishing a weapon. It’s a depiction of the violence Brody said he grew up with culturally; an American diet of toy guns, video games and McDonald’s.
A selection of work from the show
Also included in the exhibition is his “Vermin” series; oversized black and white images of rats that appear to pixelate behind street art tags. As a pet rat owner, he has a certain empathy for them, stating “They’re forced to kind of hide and scurry about and forge for themselves, and are being poisoned by kind of this kind of campaign to eradicate them. And people are nasty to them and that always bothered me.”
Needless to say, the exhibition produced a lot of head scratching from critics and The Art Children alike; shady comments included the following:
– “To say they look like A.I.-generated images resulting from search terms ‘90s LES graffiti’ ‘Americana’ and ‘Disney nostalgia’ would be too generous.”
– “Brody is trying to do something with mice and rats, but there’s no attempt to marshal this imagery toward contemporary critique.”
– “What they actually resemble is the kind of sanitized street art that’s sold on 53rd Street outside MoMA or on the sidewalk in SoHo — work aimed at tourists seeking an arty yet unchallenging New York souvenir.”
One of Brody’s creations (a blue-eyeshadowed Marilyn Monroe with the Hollywood sign poking out behind a puff of her blonde hair) recently sold at the amfAR Cannes Gala for $425,000.
This brought more criticism and shady comments (with “derivative” and “done” being chief descriptors) until the Feral Art Children and others came to Brody’s defense online saying that Brody has a valid point of view, and that most of the criticism was a bias against collage (as it’s often “female coded”) and “red chip art.” Unlike “blue chip art” (more “traditional” works by established artists [often dead, White, and male] that generally sell for tens of millions to a rich clientele mostly buying for investment) red-chip art is dominated by visuals like super-flat cartoons, a street art/graffiti aesthetic, limited-edition dolls, limited-edition NFTs, limited-edition fashion items, digital art, and meme coins. Prominent “red chip” artists include names like Takashi Murakami, KAWS, Virgil Abloh, Hirst, and others. Red Chip Art is a much more volatile market more dependent on personal taste as opposed to investment (the exception being NFTs) and with notable exceptions generally doesn’t fetch as high a price, so the more traditional dealers and galleries tend to shy away from it. (OP NOTE: Artists like Koons, Basquiat, Banksy, and Haring are considered both as they have the street cred of red chip artists but also command extremely high prices) Feral Art Children generally are either red chip artists themselves or fans of that genre, so it’s no surprise they came to Brody’s defense. Other defenders include his gallery, mom, and other well-wishers online.
General Consensus: Mixed
Ed Sheeran
Yes, he really went for the “I am an ARTEEST” look. All that is missing is the black beret and paint palette. Photo credit: HENI
Sheeran, on the other hand, seems to have started his art journey rather recently, starting in 2019 when his “Divide” tour ended. in 2020, he used one of his early creations as the official artwork for his single Afterglow. Recently, Sheeran announced he is selling a series of paintings titled ‘Cosmic Carpark’ (inspired by “celestial patterns) to raise funds for his Ed Sheeran Foundation, which aims to provide music education for children through London gallery HENI. For the month of July, fans of Sheeran will have the chance to buy original works on canvases and prints for £900 ($1,200) a pop.
Interesting enough, this is the only image of his work on the HENI website. I don’t think that’s by accident either.
Unfortunately for Sheeran, his work bears…an uncomfortable similarity to a certain famous artist. And almost immediately, The Art Children, critics, and haters of all stripes got out the X-Acto blades and proceeded to go IN, with comments like the following:
– “Ed Sheeran’s music is unique and phenomenal. But copying Pollock ain’t it.”
– “He has money, fame, name already through the music, massive art studio built and massive canvases to copy Pollock? and HENI is promoting? Got it! This shit is exactly why I lost faith in the art scene.”
– “Well, it’s a good thing he still has his day job.”
– “While he has successfully defeated plagiarism claims regarding his songs, he would have no defence from the Jackson Pollock estate.” This came from a scathing review of his work in The Guardian, which….ouch.
Comments were even more pointed on Artnet’s Instagram page, with more than a few people bringing up Sheeran’s many music plagiarism lawsuits, suggesting this was more of the same. (OP Note: Sheeran did not help matters by stating “it’s mostly just splashing colors on canvases, think Jackson Pollock” about the exhibition in a social media post). Some brought up the fact that if not for his close association with Damian Hirst and Joe Hage (founder of HENI) he would have never gotten a show in the first place. Another person mentioned since the Foundation is in his name and he’s creating the work the whole thing is probably a tax writeoff. Others described his work as “being lazy” which I have to agree with, because WTF is this?
Photo credit: HENI
I’m not a huge fan of Abstract Expressionist art, but have to admit Pollock’s works has a certain life, energy, and movement that his imitators cannot reproduce. I’ve seen the same thing in imitators of Mapplethorpe’s work thinking that taking pictures of dicks is all they need to do to capture the magic of his photography, missing the point entirely. For me, I’m reminded of the output of a certain toy popular with Gen X children in the 1970s:
General Consensus: Negative
Final Thoughts:
Out of the two, I much prefer Brody’s work. He has a point of view, can explain his process, and it looks like at least some effort went into his paintings. Sheeran on the other hand splashed paint on some canvases and called it a day and I absolutely cannot, plus his work looks like bootleg Pollock. Even worse, he admitted that’s what he was actually going for. It’s not even a close contest.
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