Why do so many celebrities get the art calling?

In 2013, the gossip website Showbiz Spy ran a piece about Brad Pitt that I’ve remembered ever since, not least because I have somehow retained a screenshot of a statement from it—the affectionately named “DumbBrad.jpg” – across two laptop changes. The article addressed an in-house controversy at MOCA, the respected Californian art museum, over Pitt’s desire to serve on its board of trustees. Certainly, he had the $250,000 required to make the application, and the annual $75,000 membership fee would have meant nothing to him. Still, “while they admire[d] Brad’s ambition,” an unnamed source suggested, “I think the fear [with some members] is that Brad might be a little on the dumb side to serve on an art board… just because he can buy art does not mean he can curate it. Good looks and fame are simply not enough to run a huge museum like the MOCA.” I personally have no idea whether or not Brad Pitt is dumb. I do know that he is beautiful to look at—not necessarily in a way that I appreciate erotically, but in the way that, say, a sunset or a mountain range is beautiful. Brad Pitt’s beauty is a powerful and elemental thing, and like many powerful and elemental things, it provokes an audience reaction. Sometimes, that reaction is not envy or arousal, but disdain. “Here stands Brad Pitt at a gallery in Los Angeles,” New York magazine tittered a year later in a photo caption underneath an image of Pitt seeming to inspect a tasteful photograph of a female nude. “Here, Brad Pitt admires the human form. Here, Brad Pitt reflects upon the male gaze.” The message could not have been clearer if the magazine had simply named the picture “DumbBrad.jpg” themselves: here was a man whose job made him a thing to be gazed at, and not someone who was qualified to gaze, and accordingly the sight of him trying to appreciate an artwork was a thing to be mocked, an unnatural image that recalled a dog standing upright or a squirrel on a jet ski. Look, it said, he thinks he’s people!

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A post shared by Sara Hildénin taidemuseo | Sara Hildén Art Museum (@sarahildenart)

Eventually, Brad Pitt did the only thing he could think of to disprove his detractors in the art world: he himself became an artist. Did he become a good artist? In a sense, this is irrelevant. It is possible to argue that he was already a good artist, if one thinks of being a movie star as art – Pitt is not, for my money, one of the most technically gifted actors of his generation, but he is one of the most luminously charismatic, and to say that the camera loves him is like saying that Romeo was somewhat fond of Juliet. What is interesting about his foray into fine art is what it suggests about his image of himself, and about what he feels he needs to prove to the rest of the world. “I’m one of those creatures that speaks through art,” he told GQ in 2022, on the eve of his first art exhibition, where he showed alongside musician Nick Cave and artist Thomas Houseago at the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Finland. “I just want to always make. If I’m not making, I’m dying in some way.” Actors, who speak other people’s words for a living, are often perceived as being at their best when they completely disappear, dissolving into a character until the seams no longer show. Making art, by contrast, is traditionally seen as a way for the artist to express their interior life: to prove, perhaps, that they are not too dumb or too beautiful to have an interior life in the first place. Many celebrities end up becoming artists, albeit amateur artists, and although their reasons for doing so may vary, I suspect that there is usually an element of this desire to set the record straight. When your life revolves entirely around your physical, external image, you must sometimes long to have the world see who you really are beneath your skin, and so when Brad Pitt makes a sculpture of a gunfight to show that he disagrees with war, or when Sharon Stone paints flowers to remind us that “the garden is where God lives, in nature,” their intention is for us to shift our focus from their looks to (to put it somewhat loftily) the content of their souls. The celebrity art career is, in other words, a convenient way for a very famous person to make visible the creativity and hard work that – when it is more typically applied to their bodies, faces, and personas – is meant to remain invisible, and ideally unacknowledged.

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A post shared by Sylvester Stallone Art (@stalloneartwork)

This month, a court-mandated sale of work made by the late Michael Jackson—a shall-we-say-problematic figure for whom the phrase “separating the art from the artist” might as well have been invented—was due to take place at King’s Auction in Las Vegas (it has since been delayed due to bankruptcy complications). In most cases, the subject matter of these sketches is so all-American as to be farcical: US Presidents, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, and so on. There are also flowers and pretty little landscapes, as if to suggest a certain innocence – a clean mind. (“A few of Michael’s pieces are done with watercolours and tell a story of tranquillity,” the auction write-up noted, a piquant observation given that Jackson’s story is not a particularly tranquil one in general.) Most interesting of all is a self-portrait, showing Jackson at the centre of a crest, beneath a crown that literalises his “King of Pop” title. Whether or not Jackson really did the sketch, as has since been contested by his personal estate, the fact remains that it is a perfect, arguably more successful two-dimensional take on what he had hoped to do with his body: he looks posthuman and smooth and almost childlike, like a cartoon prince rather than an adult man. It is Jackson as he no doubt wanted to feel, even if it isn’t quite how he looked. The way famous people choose to depict themselves in art is fascinating in particular precisely because such a large percentage of their job is already about choosing how to depict themselves in actual life: how to pose for the camera, what to tweak, what to wear, when to diet, when to drop or to take up a trend.

Sylvester Stallone, who often professes to be a better artist than he is an actor, began painting the character of Rocky Balboa some time before his iconic film Rocky was released in 1976. “Both in art and film,” he told Artnet in 2021, “I [look] at figures like Spartacus or Hercules who radiate hyper-reality through their hyper masculinity.” As Balboa, his figure radiated a hyperreal kind of masculinity, too – macho plus, as if his body had been exaggerated as a commentary on maleness. Stallone’s painting career may have started out as a means to reflect his inner life, but his star persona also came to imitate his art, making him inextricable from the fictional boxer he first conjured up on canvas in the 1970s.

 

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A post shared by Sharon Stone (@sharonstone)

Brad Pitt himself has been the subject of a great many portraits, chiefly photographic ones. As far as self-portraiture is concerned, the closest he has come is a work that appeared in his Finnish exhibition: a clear silicon model of a house, riddled with bullets. Given that the piece was made in the aftermath of his fraught divorce from the actress Angelina Jolie, it seemed obvious – given some of the legal details of the split being covered in the press – that he was issuing a statement, albeit obliquely. Here was a depiction of the private and domestic rendered totally transparent; a suggestion of the presence of violence, or destruction, in the home. “To me it’s about self-reflection,” he said at the exhibition opening, as reported by the Daily Mail. “It’s about how… where have I gotten it wrong in my relationships, where have I misstepped, where am I complicit? It was born out of ownership of what I call a ‘radical inventory of self’.”

When a famous person is tasked with responding to a controversy, they can so easily do more harm than good – aside from the fact that putting such things into words opens them up to legal trouble, it can also cause a great deal of reputational damage if their choice of language is not utterly pitch-perfect. If producing art allows a public figure to show us their true selves, it also allows them to do so in a manner that allows for a degree of plausible deniability – lets them be honest with us, in effect, without actually being fully honest with us – and one has to guess that this is an appealing option, too. With his sculpture, Pitt addressed the situation in his personal life in such a way that he did not totally exonerate himself, but did not fully incriminate himself, either, showing us instead that he was self-aware, probably highly therapised, and willing to admit just enough fault to appear human to his fans. In other words: not so DumbBrad.jpg after all.