The 2026 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award has gone to
London-based artist Ella Fleck for her installation training material (aria),
presented with LA gallery Ehrlich Steinberg in the fair’s Focus section.
Fleck’s project draws on her undercover training as a “chatter” for an OnlyFans
“parasite company”, a third-party agency that impersonates female creators and
holds scripted conversations with subscribers. Often run transnationally by
men, these agencies operate as outsourced intimacy factories. Their workers,
frequently based in the Global South, perform scripted flirtation and emotional
labour designed to maximise revenue. The “girl” a subscriber thinks he is
messaging at 2 a.m. is more often than not a poorly paid shift worker following
a productivity dashboard. It is a world of impersonation, alienation and
relentless monetisation, where human connection becomes a revenue stream and
loneliness a commodity.
Fleck’s research is serious, and her installation is one of
the few works at Frieze to engage with the realities of life under contemporary
capitalism. Visitors stand on a raised server-floor platform, where modular
tiles and exposed cabling evoke the digital economy’s hidden infrastructure.
Male voices performing chatter scripts reverberate through the structure,
transforming the floor into a resonant chamber. Three monitors show a
custom-coded manager’s dashboard, adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered
during training, exposing the metrics, quotas and supervisory systems that
govern this labour. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, reminding
visitors that the desire being sold is manufactured. The installation’s
strongest gesture is its insistence that visitors stand directly on the
machinery of commodified intimacy, feeling the scripted voices vibrate beneath
their feet. It effectively exposes a workplace usually concealed behind the
fantasy of personal connection.
But the response to the work, and how it is framed, reveals
the art establishment's ideological boundaries. The Camden Art Centre jury
praised the installation for making visible “the hidden architectures and
technologies of online desire and commerce,” and for addressing “money,
control, labour, manipulation and the power of images.” These are safe, abstract
formulations. They gesture toward critique while avoiding the specific social
relations underlying the industry Fleck has investigated. Absent is any
recognition of the workers themselves: who they are, what they are paid, and
how their labour fits into the global chains of exploitation underpinning
platform capitalism. The chatter economy is not merely a cultural phenomenon or
a question of “desire”; it is a brutally efficient mechanism for extracting
profit from both the poorly paid worker typing scripted flirtations and the
isolated man paying for companionship he cannot find elsewhere. Fleck’s
installation points to these realities, but the art world’s reception reveals
how far it will go and where it draws the line.
Inside the machinery of commodified intimacy
The most compelling aspect of Fleck’s project is her
immersion in what might be called the chatter economy: a hidden, industrialised
sector of digital labour beneath the glossy marketing of “creator platforms.”
Using a male alias, she trained as “Eliott,” learning the scripts, behavioural
prompts and manipulative techniques used to extract money from isolated men
seeking connection. The arrangement is brutally simple: men impersonate women,
chat with other men and sell the illusion of intimacy. What is marketed as
personal desire is actually a production line governed by metrics, quotas and
managerial oversight. The chatter is not a romantic interlocutor but a worker
performing emotional labour under conditions shaped entirely by profit.
This is the true subject of Fleck’s installation, and where
the work is strongest. She does not present the chatter economy as a metaphor
or cultural curiosity; she treats it as a workplace. The installation gives
this system physical form, making visitors confront the infrastructure that
enables such labour. Its raised server-floor platform with modular tiles,
exposed cabling and vibration exciters evokes the hidden architecture of the
digital economy. This is the kind of flooring found in data centres,
call-centre facilities and server rooms: the literal ground on which
contemporary exploitation rests. Standing on it, visitors feel male voices from
scripted chatter reverberate through their feet. The fantasy of intimacy gives
way to the physical sensation of labour.
Three monitors show a custom-coded manager’s dashboard,
adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered during her training. It displays the
metrics that shape the chatter’s day: response times, conversion rates,
subscriber spending, and productivity targets. The dashboard isn't an artistic
invention; it reflects the real tools this industry uses to monitor and
discipline workers. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, underscoring the
manufactured nature of the desire being sold. Everything in the installation
points to the same conclusion: intimacy has been industrialised, and the
worker’s body reduced to scripts and metrics has been absorbed into a system
designed to monetise loneliness.
The platform itself is the installation’s strongest element.
It makes the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure tangible, revealing the
labour beneath the fantasy. This is a workplace, not a boudoir call centre
disguised as a love affair. Visitors stand not in a realm of desire, but amid
the machinery of commodification. The voices vibrating through the floor are
not whispers of seduction; they are echoes of wage labour. The installation’s
power comes from this inversion: it collapses the distance between digital
fantasy and the physical conditions that produce it.
Fleck’s decision to foreground the infrastructure is
significant. Much contemporary art dealing with digital culture remains at the
level of imagery, aesthetics or surface critique. Fleck instead directs
attention to the material base: the servers, the scripts, the dashboards, the
labour processes. She shows that the chatter economy is not a cultural
phenomenon but a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism. Workers
performing these scripts are often based in the Global South, earning low
wages, sometimes paid partly on commission. Their labour is outsourced
emotional work, sold under the guise of intimacy, and governed by the same
managerial logic that structures call centres, content moderation farms and
other forms of digital piecework.
In this sense, Fleck’s installation is about more than
deception or fantasy. It shows how human connection becomes a commodity and
emotional labour is reduced to programmable tasks. It suggests that capitalism
colonises even life’s most intimate aspects, turning affection, attention, and
companionship into sources of revenue. The installation is most effective when
it insists on this material reality and forces visitors to confront the
machinery beneath the illusion.
What the jury praised and what it avoided
The Camden Art Centre jury praised Fleck’s installation for
exposing “hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce,”
and for addressing “money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of
images.” Such phrases are typical of contemporary curatorial discourse: safe,
abstract and deliberately non-committal. They gesture toward critique without
naming the social relations at stake. This allows the institution to appear
engaged with labour and exploitation while avoiding confrontation with the
actual conditions of the workers whose labour the piece makes visible. In this
sense, the jury’s statement is not merely incomplete; it reflects the art
world's ideological limits.
It entirely fails to recognise the workers. The chatter
economy is neither an aesthetic phenomenon nor a cultural metaphor; it is a
workplace staffed by real people doing real labour under conditions of
exploitation. Investigative reporting over the past several years has
documented chatters in the Philippines and elsewhere in the global South
working for low wages, sometimes with part of their pay tied to commission.
Their work is outsourced call-centre labour presented as intimacy. They work
night shifts, follow scripts, meet quotas, and are monitored by dashboards like
those used in customer-service centres and content-moderation farms. Above them
are agency owners, creators, and OnlyFans itself, whose billionaire owner takes
a cut of every transaction. The chatter economy is not a cultural curiosity but
a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism.
At the bottom of this hierarchy are two exploited figures.
First is the poorly paid chatter, typing scripted flirtations, whose work hides
behind the illusion of personal connection. Second is the isolated man paying
for companionship he cannot find elsewhere, whose loneliness the same system
monetises. Each is exploited differently, but by the same system: the chatter’s
labour is cheapened and concealed, while the subscriber’s emotional need is
commodified and sold back to him. Both are victims of a social order that has
turned human connection into a revenue stream.
The jury’s language dissolves these realities into a cloud
of abstractions. “Labour” becomes a conceptual motif rather than a class
relation. “Desire” becomes a cultural theme rather than a symptom of social
breakdown. “Manipulation” becomes an aesthetic category rather than a
description of how corporations profit from human vulnerability. This is no
accident. The art world is comfortable with metaphors but allergic to material
analysis. It can tolerate works that expose mechanisms, but not those that explain
them. Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure the industry,
and the art world, dependent on the fortunes of the wealthy, is unwilling to do
so.
The chatter economy directly expresses the social crisis
created by decades of neoliberal restructuring: insecure work, the collapse of
public life, atomisation, and the erosion of community. The men who pay for
scripted companionship are not simply indulging in “heterosexual male fantasy,”
as the fair’s own description suggests. They are responding to lives shaped by
austerity, precarity, and social isolation. Their loneliness is not a
psychological quirk but a social fact. The chatter’s labour is not merely a
cultural phenomenon; it is exploitation. Yet the art world frames both as
matters of “desire,” “images,” and “online commerce,” as though the problem
were representation rather than political economy.
This abstraction serves a purpose: it allows institutions
like Frieze and Camden Art Centre to acknowledge exploitation without
implicating themselves in the system that produces it. IMG, a global
entertainment corporation, owns Frieze, and it sells luxury goods to the
wealthy. It is structurally incapable of addressing the class relations
underpinning the chatter economy, because those same relations underpin the art
market itself. Speaking plainly about exploitation in one sector would invite
questions about exploitation in another. Better, then, to speak in abstractions
to praise works for revealing “hidden architectures” while leaving the owners
of those architectures unnamed.
Fleck’s installation points to the realities the jury
avoids. It reveals the machinery beneath the fantasy. But the art world’s
response shows how far it will go and where it draws the line.
Gender as mask, not engine
Frieze’s own description presents Fleck’s installation as an
investigation of “heterosexual male fantasies.” This is a familiar move:
reducing a social phenomenon to psychology, then reducing psychology to gender.
It is the standard reflex of contemporary cultural institutions faced with
exploitation they cannot name. Gender becomes a convenient interpretive screen,
safe, fashionable, and politically unthreatening. But gender is not the engine
of this industry; it is the costume. The engine is the commodification of human
need.
The chatter economy is not meaningfully driven by “fantasy.”
Capital's logic drives it: the imperative to extract profit from every human
vulnerability, every emotional deficit, and every form of isolation produced by
a society organised around competition and precarity. Fantasy is merely the
interface; the machinery beneath it is economic.
Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism feels almost too
literal here. In the chatter economy, what appears to be a relationship between
a subscriber and a woman who doesn't exist is really a relationship between a
customer and a wage worker, mediated by a corporation and concealed by
software. The “girl” is a commodity, the “relationship” a transaction, and the
“desire” a revenue stream. The human connection the subscriber believes he is
buying is, in fact, a relation between things: a script, a dashboard, and a
payment processor. Fleck’s installation brilliantly places the visitor directly
on the infrastructure that makes this deception possible. But the work falters
when it treats the problem as one of male fantasy rather than capitalist social
relations.
The art world refuses to ask the question it must: why so
many men, often young and precariously situated, spend money they do not have
on scripted companionship. The answer is not some fixed quality of
“heterosexual male fantasy.” It lies in the conditions of life under late
capitalism: insecure work, the erosion of community life, atomisation, and
loneliness on a mass scale. The chatter economy is no cultural aberration; it
is a symptom of a society where millions live without stable relationships,
public spaces, time, or security. Men who pay for companionship are not
indulging a psychological quirk; they are responding to a social crisis.
An industry that profits from loneliness depends on a
society that produces it. The chatter economy commercialises a condition shaped
by decades of neoliberal restructuring: the destruction of social housing, the
erosion of welfare, the casualisation of labour, and the collapse of collective
institutions. Loneliness is not an individual failing, but a structural outcome,
and the chatter economy monetises it.
Yet Frieze’s framing reduces all of this to “male fantasy,”
as if the problem were representation rather than political economy. This
reduction serves a clear ideological function: it shifts attention from the
class relations structuring the industry to individual behaviour, turns
exploitation into psychology, and recasts a social crisis as a cultural trope.
It lets the institution appear critical while avoiding any confrontation with
the system that produces both the chatter’s labour and the subscriber’s
isolation.
This marks the ideological limit of contemporary art
discourse. It can acknowledge desire, fantasy, and representation, but not
class. It can discuss gender, but not exploitation. It can gesture toward
“hidden architectures,” yet it cannot name their owners. Fleck’s installation
points to the realities the fair’s framing avoids, revealing the machinery
beneath the illusion. But the art world’s response shows how far it will go and
where it draws the line.
The art fair as ideological filter
The setting matters. Frieze is not an innocent backdrop but
an active ideological filter. IMG, a global entertainment and sports
conglomerate, owns the fair, and its business model depends on circulating
luxury goods to the wealthy. Its purpose is not cultural enrichment but capital
accumulation. In this context, the presentation and celebration of a work
exposing the commodification of intimacy becomes a kind of theatre: a momentary
glimpse of exploitation staged inside an event devoted to commodifying artistic
labour itself. The contradiction is glaring, yet the fair’s framing neutralises
it with remarkable efficiency.
The Camden Art Centre jury notes, blandly, that Fleck’s
installation is presented in the “particular context” of an international art
fair. This phrase is a masterpiece of evasion. It acknowledges the setting only
to deflate its significance immediately. The “particular context” is not
particular at all; it is the structural condition of the work’s reception. But
the jury cannot explore that context. Doing so would require acknowledging that
the art world itself is part of the same system of extraction, speculation, and
class power that produces the chatter economy Fleck has investigated. The
chatter economy monetises loneliness; the art fair monetises culture. Both
depend on the same class hierarchy, the same concentration of wealth, the same
global circuits of capital.
This is the ideological limit of “critical” art under
capitalism. It may expose mechanisms, but it must not explain them. Exposure is
safe; explanation is dangerous. Exposure can be absorbed into the fair’s
marketing language: “hidden architectures,” “online desire,” “the power of
images.” Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure
the industry: the billionaire owners, the speculative collectors, the corporate
sponsors, the financial institutions that treat art as a hedge against
inflation. It would require acknowledging that the fair’s own existence depends
on the fortunes of the rich, and that the art world’s economic base is
inseparable from the inequalities it occasionally gestures toward.
The chatter economy and the art market are not parallel
phenomena; they express the same social order. In both, labour is hidden, value
is extracted, and human need is commodified. The chatter’s emotional labour is
concealed behind the fantasy of intimacy; the artist’s intellectual labour is
concealed behind the glamour of the fair. The subscriber pays for companionship
he cannot find elsewhere; the collector pays for cultural capital he cannot
produce. Corporations mediate both transactions and profit from individuals'
alienation in a society organised around competition and scarcity.
Yet the fair’s framing insists on treating Fleck’s work as a
cultural commentary rather than a political one. It reduces exploitation to
aesthetics, class relations to “themes,” and structural inequality to
“context.” This is not simply a failure of analysis; it is a structural
necessity. The art world cannot name the system that sustains it. It cannot
acknowledge that the same forces driving workers in the Philippines to perform
scripted intimacy for low wages also drive artists to produce market‑friendly
work for speculative buyers. It cannot admit that the same social conditions
that make art fairs the preserve of the ultra-rich also produce the loneliness
monetised by OnlyFans.
Fleck’s installation, by exposing the machinery beneath the
fantasy, points toward these realities. But the institution’s response reveals
how far it will go and where it draws the line. The fair can tolerate critique,
but only if it remains abstract. It can reward exposure, but only if it stops
short of explanation. It can acknowledge exploitation, but only if it does not
name the exploiters.
Where Fleck’s work points and where it stops
None of this is meant as a criticism of Fleck for exhibiting
at Frieze. Artists have to work within existing institutions, not those they
wish existed. The contemporary art world offers few places for serious
engagement with the realities of exploitation, and fewer still where such work
can be funded, shown, and discussed. Fleck’s willingness to enter a squalid
corner of the digital economy, rather than theorising about it from a safe
distance, is admirable. Much contemporary art is contentless: formal games,
lifestyle branding, or gestures of political “concern” that vanish on contact
with reality. Fleck’s work has a genuine subject, grounded in research and
lived experience. It is rare to see an artist spend time inside the machinery
of exploitation rather than merely depict its surface.
But the installation stops at exposure. It reveals the
machinery beneath our feet without showing the system that built it. It lays
bare the cabling and pipework, but not the ownership and exploitation that make
them profitable. It gestures toward class, then retreats into gender. It
identifies alienation without tracing its roots. The chatter economy is not an
isolated phenomenon; it is a symptom of a broader social order that has
commodified every human need and hollowed out every form of collective life.
Exposing the mechanism without analysing the system leaves viewers with
discomfort, but not understanding.
This limitation is not personal; it reflects the pressures
on artists working within institutions whose economic base depends on the very
class whose power they might otherwise critique. The art world can tolerate
works that reveal exploitation, but only if they do not name the exploiters. It
can reward exposure, but not explanation; acknowledge alienation, but not the
social relations that produce it. Fleck’s installation pushes against these
boundaries, but does not break them. It points beyond itself, toward questions
the art world is structurally unwilling to confront.
The next stepone Fleck is well positioned to take in her
upcoming solo exhibition at Camden Art Centreis to follow these threads
further: from the infrastructure to the people who inhabit it; to the chatters
in the global South, whose labour is hidden behind the fantasy of intimacy; to
the agency owners who profit from their work; to the platform’s billionaire
class, whose wealth is built on monetising loneliness; and to the social
conditions that produce mass loneliness in the first place: precarious
employment, collapsing public services, atomised communities, and decades of
austerity that have stripped life of stability and connection.
Such an approach would not simply expose a mechanism; it
would analyse a system. It would show that the chatter economy is not a
cultural curiosity but a direct expression of the crisis of social reproduction
under late capitalism. It would reveal that men paying for companionship are
not indulging a psychological quirk but responding to life conditions shaped by
insecurity and isolation. It would also show that the exploitation of chatters
and the alienation of subscribers are two sides of the same social order.
This would be work worth seeing. It would move beyond the
art world’s comfort zone of abstraction and metaphor to confront the class
relations shaping both the digital economy and the cultural institutions that
claim to critique it. Fleck has already shown she can uncover the hidden sites
of contemporary exploitation. The challenge now is to follow those threads to
their source: the system that produces them, and the possibility of a world
where human connection is not a commodity.
