Feel Bad Hit of the Summer Pt. 2
Any Colour You Like as Long as It’s Bleak.

by Francis Russell.

Writing for the London School of Economics blog, computational scientist Aurélie Jean and economist Mark Esposito introduce the notion of the attachment economy to note recent algorithmic mutations in digital capitalism.[1] They define the term by contrasting it with the more familiar attention economy, which is epitomised through the technology of the ‘feed’ or ‘stream’ and relies for its economic and behavioural power on the frictionlessness of the user experience. From constantly activated devices, on-demand streaming services, and endless scrolling opportunities, to the very kinesiology of the human thumb gliding frictionlessly across the sheer surface of the phone or tablet screen, underpinning the attention economy is, as media theorist Jakko Kemper has argued, a “perceptual condition in which technology at the same time mediates a constantly growing sphere of human activity and increasingly divests the user’s view of technology’s presence (along with everything that sustains this presence).”[2]  
        Contrasted with the attention economy, the attachment economy refocuses the user’s experience through the production of intimacy with an algorithmic persona. While discrete mental health chatbots like Woebot have been discontinued due to a lack of funding, the more functionally general and extremely successful LLMs like ChatGPT now feature in the growing armature of digital self-soothing. As public policy lawyer Alexandra Evans reports, companies like OpenAI have claimed that potentially 0.15% of ChatGPT users (roughly one million people globally) show evidence of being emotionally reliant on their model, a figure that is troubling on its own—not to mention allegations of teenagers planning, and arguably justifying, their suicides in conversation with LLMs.[3] Following Evans’ warnings, such individuals can be seen as victims of a newly emerging attachment economy that seeks to ensnare users through a capacity to mimic their preferred attachment style. As has been commented on in numerous sources, today’s explosion of LLM chatbots have generally agreeable, if not sycophantic dispositions, such that, through a combination of frictionlessness and flattery, digital capitalism’s new products grab our attention qua attachment.
        While likely unintended, it is nevertheless fascinating, if not eerie, how closely an LLM like ChatGPT resembles the kind of behaviour that influential psychiatrists like John Bowlby considered optimal for child rearing. As Oliver Davis and Tim Dean summarise in their Hatred of Sex, according to Bowlby’s attachment theory, “if the suffering of intrapsychic conflict is to be avoided, the caregiver must send only unmixed messages to the child, must convey positive affect (without ambivalence), and must be reliably ‘available’ in these ways whenever needed.”[4] It is difficult not to hear elements of Sarah Connor’s internal monologue from Terminator 2, where, on witnessing her son John Connor playing with the titular killing machine, she reflects

watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

The standard of unconditional and unambivalent love, of constant availability and attention, and the absence of negative affect is obviously an extremely difficult, if not impossible, standard to live up to. Where most parents have “failed”, however, a theory has succeeded, becoming increasingly popular and influential; escaping the domains of government policy, human resource management, and civil society organisations, to become part of our broader cultural moment. To quote Rachel Ciesla and Robert Cook

attachment theory has leapt from applications in formal therapeutic contexts to popular culture. Social media especially is now saturated with reels, memes and quizzes that map our behaviours—ghosting, breadcrumbing, love bombing, negging, cuffing, to name a few—onto the anxious, avoidant, disorganised and secure styles of attaching.[5]

   
As discussed in Pt. 1 of this series, despite being largely retrospective, and consisting of many works that predate the age of attachment and attention economies alike by over a century, Ciesla’s and Cook’s Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art resonates far more powerfully with today’s structure of feeling—characterised by an ambient sense of precariousness and pessimism—than Pivi’s ostensibly more contemporary exhibition. Indeed, it is when comparing both AGWA exhibitions that the retrograde qualities of Pivi’s work, and their discursive framing, come into view most clearly. 


Attachment Styles asks us to consider the full spectrum of ambivalent modes of address, attention, and ultimately attachment. Nineteenth century works like James Carse’s The Punt, Echuca and James Holland’s The Piazzetta, Veniceare used to express the fundamental instability and uncertainty that underpins the market society—Marx’s and Engels’s Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft.[6] David McDiarmid’s Rainbow Aphorisms is a poignant counter-discourse to what is now almost fifty years of paranoid and pathologizing responses to queer forms of attachment; the revanchist scaremongering around queer sex that has become a mainstay of political culture. Other works such as John Longstaff’s Breaking the News, Russell Drysdale’s The Gatekeeper’s Wife, and Tom Freeman’s Porongurup Boy resonate with a contemporary sense of pessimism and anxiety concerning the future. The latter, with its depiction of a young man’s naïve faith in the optimistic promise of the big city ironically juxtaposed against the disastrous adventurism suggested by a reference to Harry Nilsson’s Midnight Cowboy theme, “Everybody’s talking at me,” is far more light-hearted than the rest, but is nevertheless darkly moving given our knowledge that its protagonist unwittingly strides, not into opportunity, but into the global financial crisis.


Works like Joy Hester’s Mad Girl, Jenny Watson’s Reflection in a Muddy Puddle, and Pixy Liao’s How to build a relationship with layered meanings speak to the more ubiquitous difficulty of relating to oneself and to others in the world of increased atomisation and self-responsibility. As Attachment Styles convincingly showcases, the emergence of market driven liberal democracies has greatly broken down the rituals and restrictions that largely contained the plurality of ways that people can find love, happiness, and meaning. By the same token, as has been discussed in detail by social and political theorists like Wendy Brown and Andreas Reckwitz (among others), this explosion at the level of relationality has greatly expanded, not only the ways we can be frustrated and emotionally wounded, but also the ways we can be held accountable—or at least made to feel responsible—for our own affective and interpersonal failings. Indeed, in a society that holds sacrosanct the idea that there is no inheritable good life—that each individual must decide how they are to relate to the world and which attachments will lead to their flourishing—not only does the possibility of getting it fundamentally wrong increase dramatically, one is left ultimately with no one but themselves to blame. The diversity of works exhibited in Attachment Styles speaks to this dilemma, since almost any piece could be taken equally as an exemplary way of life or a lesson to be learned.
        Understandably, this requirement that we take full ownership and responsibility for the success of our complex and utterly irrational intimate lives has only strengthened the power of the psychological sciences and the various manualised approaches to the sphere of the interpersonal. Especially on social media, proscriptions and injunctions related to emotional and relational propriety are almost unavoidable. For this reason, while Ciesla’s and Cook’s affirmation of art in the age of the attachment economy, expressed in terms of its “complexity” and “many layered, sometimes elusive process and language” might come across as a bland cliché, I think there is something defensible about art’s ability to open a space for inquiry into both attachment and the therapeutic discourses that govern it. Indeed, it is perhaps precisely because of art’s inability to say anything decisive, its inability to assume a sense of moral authority, scientific rigour, or political efficacy, that it persists as a rare space in which we are forced to encounter attachment as truly ambiguous and fundamentally problematised—and thus as a space in which our failure to attach, or at least to attach well, can be explored without the stakes being unbearably high.
        For these reasons, and putting to one side the sometimes wince-inducing didactic explanations that accompany the works in Attachment Styles, the exhibition stands in stark contrast to the globe-trotting enthusiasm and self-assuredness of I Don’t Like It, I Love It. While these haphazard attempts to be accessible reveal a pensive and ambivalent attachment to the viewing public, albeit one that is shared by the majority of state art institutions the world over, Ciesla’s and Cook’s catalogue of relational (mis)adventure speaks more directly and productively to our cultural moment. A moment from which, if we are to reflect on the heyday of the 2000s milieu that produced Pivi as a kind of template for the contemporary artist, only one response seems available: “love it? I don’t even know if I like it”.


Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 13 December 2025 – 2 May 2027.

---

Footnotes:

1. Aurélie Jean and Mark Esposito, “Humans Emotionally Dependent on AI? Welcome to the Attachment Economy,” LSE Business Review, August 15, 2025, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2025/08/15/humans-emotionally-dependent-on-ai-welcome-to-the-attachment-economy/.

2. Jakko Kemper, “The Environment and Frictionless Technology: For a New Conceptualization of the Pharmakon and the Twenty-First-Century User,” Media Theory 6, no. 2 (2022), https://mediatheoryjournal.org/2023/05/10/jakko-kemper-the-environment-and-frictionless-technology/.

3. Alexandra Evans, “The Vital Role of Human Agency in the Attachment Economy,” Media@LSE, January 21, 2026, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2026/01/21/the-vital-role-of-human-agency-in-the-attachment-economy/.

4. Oliver Davis, Hatred of Sex (London: Provocations Books), https://www.provocationsbooks.com/catalogue/hatred-of-sex/.

5. Art Gallery of Western Australia, Attachment Styles: Large Print Labels (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2025), https://artgallery.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Attachment-Styles_Large-Print-Labels.pdf.

6. Although conventionally translated as ‘all that is solid melts into air’, as Peter Beilharz clarifies in his, Circling Marx: Essays 1980-2020, the original German evokes the image of the stasis of the feudal order evaporating into the clouds of steam produced by the age of locomotion and machine power. To quote Beilharz, ‘all that is standing and estate like, of the old feudal world, turns into steam, into vapour. Steam is the driver of the two most significant early modern technologies: of steam-powered machine production, and of the train. Both the early satanic mills and those monstrous contraptions portrayed by Turner were steam-powered.’

---

Header images [in order of appearance]:

1. Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art installation view, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2025. Artworks (Left to Right) – Jeffrey Smart Hide and seek 1962. Oil on plywood, 59.8 x 76.3 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1964. Frederick McCubbin Down on his luck 1889. Oil on canvas, 114.5 x 152.5 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1896. Freda Robertshaw The butterfly c 1940. Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1975. Photo: Traianos Pakioufakis.

2. Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art installation view, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2025. Artworks (Left to Right) – Louise Paramor Letters, Lies & Alibis 2004. Collage of oil based paint, 275 x 1097 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Gift of the artist, 2010. Jeffrey Smart Hide and seek 1962. Oil on plywood, 59.8 x 76.3 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1964. Photo: Traianos Pakioufakis.

3. Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art installation view, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2025. Artworks – (Right wall, main image) Mary Moore There is another world - This one No.1 (series of fifty mixed media drawings) 1989-1991. Mixed media on  paper, (a) 28.6 x 28 cm (image / sheet irregular) (b,e) 28.6 x 38.5 cm (image / sheet irregular) (c) 28.7 x 38.5 cm (image / sheet irregular) (d,g) 28.5 x 38 cm (image / sheet irregular) (f,h) 28.8 x 38.2 cm (image / sheet irregular) (i) 29 x 39 cm (image / sheet irregular). The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1991. (Back wall, images left to right) Philip Blenkinsop Untitled [postcard - girl with Eat Your Own Sperm T-shirt] c1995. Resin coated photographic print, 20.1 x 25.4 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Gift of Max Pam, 2004. Machiel Botman Untitled [paper house in hand] c1995. Silver gelatin photograph, 49 x 60.4 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Gift of Max Pam, 2004. Paul den Hollander Untitled [man in hedge], and Untitled [woman in hedge] 1985. Photograph, 11.2 x 11.2 cm each. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Gift of Max Pam, 2004. Marie-Paule Nègre Cameron Brown at his house in New York 1992. Silver gelatin photograph, 48.7 x 59.8 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Gift of Max Pam, 2004. Bernard Plossu Untitled [Girl at beach] c1970. Silver gelatin photograph, 40.4 x 30.7 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Gift of Max Pam, 2004.