He’s a sullen boy! (All photos by moi)

A thick, saliva-soaked globule of masticated green gum peeled off a spit-swapping chewing gum-covered painting and hit the shiny gallery floor with a sickening thwack. There, it joined another sopping ball of rapidly stiffening, increasingly pink, red gum, another fallen attempt to participate in Academy Award-winning actor-turned-artist Adrien Brody’s chewing gum painting, part of his much-discussed exhibition Made in America at EDEN Gallery’s Madison Avenue space.

“Leave your mark—messy, visceral, and anonymous,” encourages a wall text near the painting, which comes with its own demand in tabloid headlines: “The Gum Wall…Stick Your Gum Here.” Adjacent to the painting is a display of assorted cheap, individually wrapped gumballs, metal bowls of yellow and black pellets (what the hell are THOSE?), and tins of Lump O’Coal, a novelty gag gift left over from Christmases past with the tagline: “Because you’ve been very naughty.” This gum buffet spreads over a series of pedestals, tumbling onto the floor in a not-so-hidden nod to Félix González-Torres, one of Brody’s many blatant artistic references that could only be made more obvious if he shouted their names at the top of his lungs. Subtlety is not exactly Brody’s forte as evidenced by the painting itself, a crowded, maniacal mishmash of winking gum imagery and word play in a garble of cut-out lettering like a ransom note sent by a Bazooka Gum-obsessed kidnapper. Rather than hostage demands, viewers are left taunted by lame gum puns like “Chew on This!” or “Blow Me!” or, even worse, bland food-related words like “flavor” or “taste.” Lest you think this painting is all juvenile fun and games, Brody has tossed in a dash of moribund memento mori with two black-and-white skulls and a pasted loud, Krugeresque red-on-white “VIOLENCE.”

Brody’s gum wall with spent gum bits

Noticing these oh-so-deep details requires squinting through a top layer of stuck-on, multicolored gum remnants. It would be way too easy to say the painting resembles the underside of a teenage delinquent’s school desk or the historically nasty Gum Wall at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, both of which are clearly intentional. Yet, there surprisingly aren’t as many pieces of gum plunked on its surface as I would expect for an exhibition that has been open for almost a month. Were gallery visitors too timid to mar a canvas? Too germophobic to touch the spittle wall? Not me! Because I was too much of a pussy to turn my mouth black for the rest of the day after visiting Brody’s exhibition, I dutifully munched on a classic—a red gumball—as I watched in disgust as that emerald gooper splat right on the ground. Yeeeee-uck. Quickly tiring of the way-too-sweet gumball, I stuck it to the painting, right in the skull’s vacant eye socket, only to discover what had occurred with the grotesque green gobbet—and likely many other viewers’ attempts at participatory vandalism. It wouldn’t stick! I shoved it with more force. Nothing. I smushed. I smeared. I pushed and pulled. Finally, the gum precariously hovered in its spot, fighting against the summer humidity and the slick painting surface. I scurried away, wiping my sticky fingers on my pants before witnessing my own grody gum make its tragic tumble.

I approached the EDEN gallerist, who had been hovering around me ever since I asked for a checklist, potentially outing myself as someone who came to witness and publicly mock, to which she replied none were printed, presumably hoping to thwart an article just like this. “Are you cleaning up gross gum off the floor all day?” I asked. “Yes,” she admitted, laughing in a way that didn’t reach her eyes. She shrugged, “But it’s fun.”

The gum buffet

Though I agreed politely at the time, is it? As a former gallery assistant, I understood her pain. Anyone who has suffered that underpaid indignity has endured something similar, whether maddening sounds of the same video art piece all day or, as I did, not being allowed to use the bathroom without calling for a replacement at the front desk because Sikkema Jenkins was afraid someone would swipe Sheila Hicks’s somewhere in the range of $15-18,000 jumble of rubber bands. But just because I empathized didn’t mean I wasn’t also misanthropically tickled by the thought of a painting so bad that it spewed spent pieces of chomped gum like biohazardous waste. Not only is the notion of a gum painting amusingly awful, but Brody’s exceeds that conceptual crapitude by being a failed gum painting. It’s heinous. It’s hilarious. It’s one of the worst artworks I’ve ever seen, barring the other paintings in Made in America that may actually be worse. I love it. I love it so much.

Yes, Adrien Brody’s exhibition Made in America may be so bad—so, so abysmally bad—that it’s actually good. That’s an accomplishment that should be celebrated. Not much visual art receives that coveted cult designation. Most art can be broken down into good, bad, and even worse, boring. Sure, there are kitschy creations like paintings of clowns, wonky animals, or Elvis on velvet found cast off at thrift stores, but I’d argue those belong in the category of good alongside the best Renaissance painters. Typically, bad art is just that—bad. Bad visual art is not fun or funny. It’s just uggo with no upside. There are some exceptions like Tennessee Williams’s godawful paintings, but while I like that those paintings suck shit, I wouldn’t say that they’re so bad, they’re good, an important distinction. Of course, the medium where so bad, it’s good shines is film, whether Megalopolis, Cats, The Room, the masterpiece of so-bad-it’s-good excellency, Showgirls, or the most recent addition in the so-bad-it’s-good vanity project canon, The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, which I enjoyed when I wasn’t worried I was going to puke from all the spinny 360 shots (A film so bad that it makes you feel physically ill is itself a feat). What do these movies have in common that visual art often cannot manage? I suspect it’s because these films are both overblown and sincere in their sheer wretchedness. Visual artists may be too self-reflective, self-conscious, and self-serious, making so-bad-it’s-good visual art like Adrien Brody’s paintings an abysmal achievement.

This was hung too high on the wall to get a close look. On purpose?

Because Made in America is both overblown and sincere, an earnestly botched attempt at pointed social commentary about the gleaming, glittering superficial surface of America’s fantasy of celebrity, luxury brands, fast food, and cartoons that hides a dark underbelly of violence, addiction, lurid fascination with tabloid dissolution, hate, and cool rats in sneakers done in the ugliest, most cliché, and dated street art-influenced way imaginable. The laughable moments begin even before putting eyes on the putrid paintings. An over-the-top flowery yet conceptually garbled and repetitive introductory wall text sets the stage with a dramatic description of the American Dream turned nightmare that reads like it was written by Tyler Durden but was unquestionably penned by Chat GPT. How do I know? Because it exactly mimics the deranged and absurd tone the AI language model produces when I prompt it to write in the style of Filthy Dreams during my many dread-filled, AI-is-going-to-kill-us existential crises. Take, for instance, this sentence that I’m convinced no human being would ever write:

“This is the America of flickering screens, sugar highs, and drive-thru delusions that Brody dissects layer by layer—in a visual autopsy, a country where freedom comes with fries and desire is always just out of reach.”

A visual autopsy?!! Freedom comes with fries? Ok…that one is kind of good. Even better than this passage is the final poetic statement printed in all italics at the bottom of the text like a poem…or a threat: “We grew up on the jingle. We believed in the cartoon. Now we live in the ad.” What the fuck does that mean?! And why am I scared?

Deep

This drama queen intro becomes that much funnier with the realization that this “cultural excavation” of America actually means the Hamburglar running from a burger-headed Officer Big Mac. Made in America is the “We live in a society” meme in painting form: Bugs Bunny waving a gun atop a collaged mess of vintage ads featuring children holding rifles; a Green Army toy soldier atop more gun advertisements; Marilyn Monroe vamping with the same blue eyeshadow and red lips from Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, only done up by a less talented makeup artist (and if you missed the reference to Warhol’s Marilyn, Brody embeds a print-out of that work within his painting. Subtle!), alongside the word, “XANAX,” you know, because Marilyn OD-ed; and Mickey Mouse wearing shorts patterned with corporate logos for Google, Apple, Starbucks, and Coca Cola, standing beside a hint of the upside-down American flag, an approximated black-and-white Lichtenstein Pop!, and, maybe my favorite detail in the entire show, the phrase, “I Heart (with an actual heart) Toxic Waste.” Me too, Adrien, and that’s why I love your show!

The most hilariously bungled social critique is undoubtedly Brody’s Vermin series. A nearby wall text describes the series as “powerful representations of how America so often perceives its immigrants, the poor, the homeless: unwanted, expendable, and unseen.” The text specifies that the title Vermin specifically alludes to the persecution of the Jewish people, specifically referencing Zyklon B, “an insecticide used to kill lice became the gas of extermination camps,” and the view of Mickey Mouse as “a filthy, dirt-caked vermin, symbol of Jewish influence and capitalist decay.” Rat paintings about antisemitism, the Holocaust, and further othering forms of hatred seem pretty heavy, until turning to paintings like this:

Cool

Is an adorable mouse in sunglasses, sporting sneakers emblazoned with Brody’s name, one of “those forced to exist in the shadows”? If, as Susie Sontag says, camp is “seriousness that fails,” then Brody unintentionally nails it, no matter how many mosquito repellent advertisements he plasters all over the canvas.

As seen in the awesome shades mouse painting, Brody renders his canvases in a goopy, chaotic style made up of collaged newspaper ads, photos, ripped magazine pages, and other hoarder scraps; stencils of rats, sharks, and razor blades (hardcore!); marker tags and spraypainted throw ups (badass!); and swoopy multicolored zig-zags of paint aiming for meaningful abstract expressionism (emotional!) but achieving mostly mess. Brody intends to mimic the frenetic, layered aesthetic of his hometown, New York’s grimy walls, plastered with years upon years of wheat-pasted advertisements, smaller stapled flyers, and graffiti. He even moves off the canvas to do so in an antagonistically enormous and aggressively unsightly installation featuring a looming, coy Betty Boop with a ruffle from Jo-Ann Fabrics attached to her bustier, the word “punk” tattooed on her cheek (so radical!), and “Keep Smiling” dyed into her hair. If Boop’s transformation into a billboard for lame affirmations wasn’t enough visual punishment, Brody also frames the vavacious toon with ads for Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, the golden Lamborghini bull, Mickey Mouse hands rolling a blunt under the phrase, “Smoke Em’ If You Got ‘Em,” Shake Shack burger symbols, and a random “You Are Here” scrawled on the wall in Sharpie. Huh? Where am I?!

Punk

Though the Boop wall is, uh, unique, Brody’s paintings, for all the striving for New York grime, look more like Mr. Brainwash rip-offs. For those who (luckily) moved on or are too young to remember, Mr. Brainwash is a street artist who makes similarly godawful paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Mickey Mouse and was the subject of the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. This makes Brody’s work about fifteen years too late to feel as fresh as an artist who was so terrible that people theorized he was a con by Banksy. That being said, Mr. Brainwash’s ugly work sold—and so has Brody’s, according to a braggy client meeting I stumbled into within EDEN Gallery’s open office plan. Mr. Brainwash isn’t the only artist recalled here. Brody’s artwork reminds me a tad of Raymond Saunders’s mixed-media canvases if, instead of relevant materials related to art education and Black history, Saunders just said fuck it and slapped on Hard Rock Cafe logos and words meant to invoke depth but instead have the profundity of a puddle like “FEELINGS.”

Beyond my own associations, Brody is not exactly secretive about his many prominent artistic influences. Alongside the aforementioned Warhol and Lichtenstein, he also drops in Salvador Dali’s bug eyes and swoopy stache, Maggie Simpson with an X pupil à la Kaws, and Basquiat’s iconic crown. Someone with more sense may question the logic of making overt nods to significantly more talented artists (ok, Kaws is debatable here), but I’m glad Brody didn’t because some of the tributes are in such poor taste that I could feel my synapses tingling in morbid glee. Case in point: the painting that centers a black-and-white photograph of shirtless Basquiat in his studio taken by Brody’s mama. Brody thought this meditative photo needed a zhuzh, so he stuffed toothy Jaws in Jean-Michel’s shorts with a sprinkle of scorpions and birds, because why not? More questionably, Brody also places a poppers bottle affixed with the label Heroin in one corner. You know, because Basquiat was an addict. If that wasn’t offensive enough, he also scrawls in mimicked SAMO lettering: “BRO BRO BRO BRODY OD.” UGH. Even for me, that’s a bit too tacky, bro.

Someone should have stopped him

As seen with Bro-Bro-Brody, the actor never permits viewers to forget exactly whose show they’re in or whether this is, in fact, an ego trip. Brody’s name is everywhere, squirreled away in almost every work, usually multiple times. Maybe the funniest painting in the show takes this egomania one step farther by featuring Brody himself in a trench coat, moodily sulking in a grungy Gotham City alleyway next to snakes and flies. Atop his head hovers a golden Basquiat crown because nothing quite says narcissistic Hollywood brain bleed quite like crowning yourself in the symbol of a significantly more gifted artist who is luckily dead and can’t complain. The painting also includes a torn ad for Brody’s hysterically dreadful vanity project/action flick/John Wick plagiarism, Clean. Not only starring as Clean’s eponymous protagonist, an ex-hitman, current garbage man who also moonlights as a white savior, Brody also co-wrote and co-produced this cinematic stinker, along with composing its overpowering, overindulgent hip-hop-influenced score. Inspired by its presence in the painting, I watched Clean (free on Tubi!) after visiting the show. The film aims for but wildly misses Taxi Driver grit as Clean drives around Utica, New York in his garbage truck, observing fish monger crime bosses, while spewing sullen monologues about the “sea of FILTH” around him. Clean is dangerous, troubled, and tortured with a tragic past and a violent present, which viewers know since Clean is either weeping, lighting a cig with a blow torch, or analyzing his current state through eye-rolling clichéd voiceovers like “I’m still looking for answers. I just don’t know the questions anymore.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Emily, that sounds awful, and so does this entire exhibition you’ve mocked for going on 2,500 words. You’re right. Clean is objectively terrible, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. Same with Made in America. Of course, I’ve had homeless guys try to sell me better paintings in Tompkins Square Park. Naturally, Brody’s work would not be out of place on a folding table on West Broadway or next to a Kramer print at a Thomas Kinkade store in a dead mall. But, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have fun, snickering my way through EDEN Gallery while avoiding eye contact with the lurking gallerist. What makes Brody’s art such an amusing experience is that it, like Clean and other so-bad-they’re-good films, is deadly serious. The exhibition is without irony, though it can—and should—be enjoyed ironically. Brody really does believe an effective way to criticize the United States’ love affair with firearms is Mickey Mouse pointing a pistol at his temple next to a sign that says “Don’t Honk.” He truly does consider a mouse holding an ax to be a powerful message against xenophobia. And he very much does think that the more skulls, the better.

Bugs has lost it

Unsurprisingly, given the state of art writing these days, the coverage of Brody’s exhibition can be divided between two campless camps: humorless grumbles of a few critics and slobbering puff pieces by publications with no self-respect. Neither is the correct response. Sure, the art world tends to close ranks when celebrities or notorious political figures attempt to shove their way into its insular world, as if the art world itself isn’t a fame-whoring hierarchy, just with more nerds. I’ve always hated this impulse because, well, it’s anti-fun. Get over yourselves! It’s a silly folly to witness Hunter Biden’s hotel lobby art (which I have) or dream about owning George W. Bush’s existential crisis in the bathtub painting (which I do). I’ll make an exception for Jim Carrey’s bad Trump art, which is so libtard hackneyed it cannot be reclaimed, unlike Brody’s art that mercifully eschews electoral politics unless you consider Yosemite Sam an elected official. But, what if everyone lightened up? Relax and enjoy art that is so reeking with flop stench that it’s actually astonishing! And I mean it. I feel astonished by Brody’s art.

In fact, the show was so astonishingly bad/good that I left EDEN Gallery with a bad taste in my mouth. No, it wasn’t due to the dubious taste of the work itself. The culprit was the sugary coating of my gnawed red gumball, filling my mouth with pasty ick and zapping the effectiveness of my salivary glands. My mouth felt weirdly both dry and saccharine sticky, and no amount of water washed it away. I’m sure my breath reeked. It was as if the sweet, rotten stench of a genuine art show stinker had rubbed off on me. And if wafting the stank of failure is not the marker of visiting a so-bad-it’s-good exhibition, I don’t know what is.