Adrien Brody Turns Raising Cane’s Times Square Into a Pop-Art Stage
Times Square’s latest art intervention comes with chicken fingers on the side. Raising Cane’s has unveiled a new mural by Adrien Brody, the Oscar-winning actor whose painting practice has increasingly pushed him into the art-world conversation. The work, titled Cane’s Anthem, now hangs at the chain’s flagship location in New York.
The mural pulls together a deliberately overbuilt mix of imagery: the Raising Cane’s logo, a large American flag, the slogan “WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!,” Labradors wearing bandanas marked with the company’s icon, and fragments of the Playbill for The Fear of 13, the play that marked Brody’s Broadway debut earlier this year. Its surfaces are made to look torn and weathered, as if the images had been pasted and peeled from a city wall.
Brody said the piece is a tribute to Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves, whom he described as a friend. In a statement, he said the mural was meant to echo “the grit, perseverance, and entrepreneurial spirit” associated with Graves, as well as “the spirit of NYC and an urban aesthetic” that has long appealed to him. He also framed the work as a celebration of “determination and triumph,” along with Graves’s philanthropy and his belief in bringing people together.
The visual language places Cane’s Anthem in the orbit of postwar tear-away aesthetics associated with Jacques Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella, artists who transformed ripped advertising into art. Brody’s version, however, arrives with a corporate sheen that makes the comparison uneasy. The piece continues the Pop-lite direction of his recent paintings, which have borrowed from the visual vocabularies of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
That practice has already drawn both attention and doubt. One of Brody’s paintings reportedly sold for $425,000 at a gala in Cannes last year, while his New York exhibition last year prompted criticism over how loosely his work engages Pop art’s history. Raising Cane’s, meanwhile, embraced the mural enthusiastically, calling it a “masterpiece.”
Whether viewed as branding, homage, or celebrity art, Cane’s Anthem underscores how porous the line between commerce and contemporary art has become — especially in a city where even a fast-food flagship can be staged as a cultural event.
