Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | June 13, 2025
Earlier this year, Adrien Brody won his second Best Actor Oscar for his undeniably excellent performance in The Brutalist. Any goodwill he had built up over awards season seemed to dissipate once he began his agonizingly long acceptance speech. Legend has it he's still giving that speech, rambling into a turned-off microphone at the empty Dolby Theatre. Cineastes have a high tolerance level for pretentious artistes but Brody seemed to test those limits. Since then, Brody has taken a break from acting to focus on his other passion: bad paintings.
Brody has received a surprising amount of press attention for his most recent exhibition at New York's Eden Gallery, as well as an auction that took place during the amfAR Cannes Gala, wherein one of his works sold for an eye-watering $425,000. Many of the reviews have been curiously positive. Cultured said his work had the same "head-tilting intensity" as his acting. The New York Times wrote a profile of him that sought to drown out the naysayers and position him as an artist of true worth, both critically and commercially.
Looking at his paintings after reading these pieces made me feel like I was having a stroke but because, truly and without hyperbole, Brody is a garbage artist. He's a rip-off of a rip-off of Andy Warhol. He's Mr. Brainwash without the earnestness. He's bereft of skill and originality, with pieces that look like police officers' attempts to fake graffiti to arrest some kids. Did you ever look at Maggie Simpson and wonder, "gee, I bet she'd look cooler if she was holding a knife and on a backdrop of paint globs next to Adrien Brody's own name"? Art is subjective but Brody's work is so bad that it almost makes me wonder if it's supposed to be satire of how the art market will invest in anything if a celebrity's name is attached.
Mercifully, plenty of voices in the art world also called out how hilariously inept Brody's work is. Annie Armstrong of Artnet News wrote, "I've already spent enough brain cells trying to dissect this work." Her colleague Alex Greenberger said the exhibit was a blend of "faux naïve aesthetic and [its] mediocre production value." He called out Brody's appropriation of Basquiat and lazy use of prominent pop culture iconography, from Marilyn Monroe to Scrooge McDuck (and even his tracings of oft-copied cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny look cheaply executed.)
It's easy to make fun of people like Brody who think their first-draft copycats are worthy of six-figure sales. That's why I'm doing it here. It's Friday. I deserve some fun. As someone who loves art, I know what it's like to see genuine masterpieces in front of you and the emotions they elicit. Last month, I went on holiday to Amsterdam and browsing both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum was a truly humbling experience. Seeing Rembrandt and Vermeer pieces up close and personal, noting the deftness of brushstrokes and minor details that no reprint could hope to capture was startling.
Also, while in Amsterdam, I went to a hilariously terrible modern art gallery full of third-tier efforts by legends like Warhol and Keith Haring, all of which were there solely because they were pieces by known artists that the gallery owners could afford to buy. This place had an entire room dedicated to the work of, uh, Robbie Williams. Yep, the singer none of you Americans understand and who is not actually a monkey. He's an artist now, apparently. And yes, his work was bad. Also, this gallery had an NFT room. Because of course they did.
I bring this up in relation to Brody because I think it helps to clarify how someone like him, an objectively terrible and unoriginal painter, can find himself vaulted to the level of Serious Artist and big market seller through no talent of his own. There are plenty of celebrities who have dipped their toes into the artworld and received undue acclaim for being able to hold a paintbrush the right way up: George W. Bush, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, etc. As ArtNews put it, "Fame tends to afford a certain aura to the people who receive it, and fans will always follow. Were these paintings by just about anyone else, no one would think twice, the New York Times wouldn't have spilled so much ink." Mediocrity is a privilege when you're cloistered by fame and money.
But it's also an issue with the art market, a blatantly scammy landscape that has utterly diluted the process of artistic creation and distilled it into an exclusively profit-driven enterprise. That modern art gallery I went to didn't have any of the legendary pieces by Yayoi Kusama or Warhol, but their names are so major that the mere presence of their work, even at its laziest or most forgettable, was a marketing coup worthy of the investment. The bigger the name, the more zeroes at the end of that one on the cheque. A bad Warhol makes more money than a good piece by an up and comer you've never heard of.
The most expensive paintings ever sold are not the best ones, however that may be defined. They're just the ones that get to the auction block. A painting that Da Vinci might not have even made sold for close to $500 million because it's not as though the Mona Lisa will ever be put on sale. And these pieces aren't bought to be put on display for the world to see, at least not the majority of the time. They're purchased by Qatari royals, Russian billionaires, hedge fund losers, and unknown sources. Why? Because the paintings are expected to keep going up in value and they can keep making money. Well, that and investing in art is good for tax write-offs.
How good an investment is a Brody painting? He's famous, albeit not for art, and celebrity sells. Pumping up the price of something makes it easier for outsiders to consider investing, which adds more money to the space for you to cash out on a profit. Nothing has value until the market decides it does, and they've settled on pretending that Brody is the future. Last year, a banana duct-taped to the wall sold for $6.2 million because a crypto bro who faced SEC lawsuits over potential wash trading and securities fraud wanted to make a point. He then ate the banana.
Frankly, there is something very funny about some bored Trump-voting rich dude with no taste owning a ton of these terrible paintings because an overpaid advisor told them to. Imagine having to hang this crap in your house and pretend it's cool. That's some real "I'm not owned" sh*t right there. I do feel for the artists who are working day after day to get a sliver of the attention Brody's gotten, but at least they have talent on their side. Perhaps they'll be able to scam the rich one day too, wallet inspector style.
I like to think Brody is doing all of this so he can buy another castle.
