It’s sad, infuriating and disgusting to watch as Brad Pitt’s crisis management team flails around, calling in favors and (clearly) spending money on a Johnny Depp-esque social media campaign. What’s even more infuriating is that many media outlets – legitimate outlets – are actively helping Pitt. This week, Pitt covers Billboard Magazine to highlight the renovation of Chateau Miraval’s music studio. Now the Financial Times has a lengthy piece called “True bromance: Brad Pitt, Nick Cave and the artist helping them to heal.” It’s all about Pitt, Cave and Thomas Houseago’s art show in Tampere, Finland, which is being exhibited until January. That’s right, Pitt is using Houseago and Nick Cave to rescue his image and make himself look like an artiste. Some asinine highlights from this piece:

Thomas Houseago on their exhibit. “We know we are totally ridiculous. But it’s real. If you see Brad Pitt – the Brad Pitt, right? You know, six pack, abs, whatever – that’s a movie creation. It’s fantastic, I love it. He’s one of the greatest actors of his generation. But there’s another human, that I know, who has enabled me to breathe in a new way. And I would like to think I’ve done the same for him.”

Houseago on their collective trauma & addiction: “We were thrown together in trauma and catastrophe,” says Houseago, referring to their shared struggles that run from addiction – Houseago and Pitt with alcohol, Cave with heroin in the ’80s – to Pitt’s much-publicised divorce and custody battle, the deaths of two of Cave’s sons…

When Pitt met Houseago: They met six years ago at a New Year’s Eve party. Houseago was struggling with his mental health and Pitt had recently separated from his second wife, Angelina Jolie. A separation that has subsequently become a media frenzy. They hit it off immediately. “Our mutual misery became comic,” says Pitt, who began hanging out at the sculptor’s studio on a regular basis, finding an artistic outlet. “And out of this misery came a flame of joy in my life. I always wanted to be a sculptor; I’d always wanted to try it.”

The bro crew: After this, says Cave, “we started to meet up as a group – a weird, diverse collection of people who would sit around a table on weekends”. The dinners were joined by the likes of Dominik (who recently directed the film Blonde, produced by Pitt’s production company Plan B, and with a soundtrack by Cave and his longtime collaborator Warren Ellis), director Spike Jonze and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “To go out and talk to people freely about things, that was something new to me,” continues Cave. “Normally, I just work away and do my thing, and I have my friends and all of that sort of stuff. But we were allowed to talk about anything. And, for me, that was a very freeing situation to be in.”

Pitt’s “sculptures”: Pitt’s work feels harder to place. His lockdown love of ceramics has been widely reported – and a cluster of his handcrafted porcelain candleholders are shown amid Houseago’s sculptures. His larger-scale sculptural works are more disturbing: a relief plaster panel imprinted with his own body to depict a filmic gunfight (but also, he suggests, “an inner conflict”) and a number of simplified house-shaped silicone structures that have each been shot at – titled Self-inflicted Gunshot Wound to the House – draw parallels about the destruction of his home life that are all too plain to see. “It’s all about self-reflection,” he explains. “I was looking at my own life and really concentrating on owning my own sh-t: where was I complicit in failures in my relationships, where have I mis-stepped. For me, it was born out of ownership of what I call a radical inventory of self, getting really brutally honest with me, and taking account of those I may have hurt.”

Pitt is open to scrutiny: Eating a sandwich later in the café, Pitt seems relieved to have put this out there. He’s surprisingly open for a man whose every move – from his signet ring to his sobriety and new skincare line – is subject to scrutiny. “It’s just exhausting to be anything but who you are,” he says. “You have to understand, at least where I grew up, we’re more the Clint Eastwood character; you hold everything within, you’re capable, you can deal with anything, you don’t show weakness. I see that in my dad and the older generations of actors, and, man, it’s exhausting. As I get older, I find such a comfort in friendships where you can be [completely yourself], and I want that to extend in the outer world. What people make of it: I’m fine. I feel safe here because there’s a focus on our struggles as human beings, because it’s fraught with peril. And joy as well.” How to talk openly about grief and trauma, yet not be defined by it, is a subject of much discussion. “I find I have to walk with the pain I experience, and I have to walk with the joy, the beauty,” says Pitt.

[From The Financial Times]

For months/years now, people have made comparisons between Pitt and Johnny Depp, and people believe that Pitt’s team (many of whom are on Depp’s team) is trying to turn Angelina into the next Amber Heard. I believe that’s the game plan, no doubt, but I’d never realized before now that Pitt’s turn is just as pathetic as Depp’s. The aging matinee idol turned druggy alcoholic loser and artist poseur, clinging desperately to his “coolness,” surrounding himself with sycophants and enablers. Abuse, violence and addiction as solely a male-abuser-centered narrative, with no space given to the voices of the women and children hurt and traumatized by the Abuser Artist.

“A number of simplified house-shaped silicone structures that have each been shot at – titled Self-inflicted Gunshot Wound to the House…” As in, Brad’s art pieces represent his desire to shoot up the family home of his ex-wife and children. The artist as family annihilator.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.