Hey! The ominouswooshing Substack returns from its 6… 7 month hiatus in new form. Expect new writing on art, music, and sometimes other stuff weekly, as well as updates on my writing elsewhere. The mission remains the same: seeing art, listening to music, watching films, enjoying culture et al is easy and good for you. You do not need to be a glamorous professional, hardy academic, or well-connected insider to have, on the reg, what I genuinely believe can be life-changing experiences. Most of the time, you just have to show up! We’re gonna push that message—and also some other stuff I just delusionally love—until the wheels fall off. Hope you’ll stick around.
— Patrick
Installation view: Jennifer Rubell: Attune Official at Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York, 2026. All images by me. Courtesy Jennifer Rubell and Meredith Rosen Gallery.
Jennifer Rubell
Attune Official
Meredith Rosen Gallery
327 West 36th Street, New York
June 3—July 31, 2026
Conceptual artist Jennifer Rubell’s latest exhibition, Attune Official, has extended its run at Meredith Rosen Gallery through the 31st. It’s an app, and a dude, and Baller (2026): a couple thousand hand-stamped inflatable beach balls, 250 of which are signed by the artist (I was unable to acquire a signed beach ball at the opening, but noted just about everybody tried looking, so they’re sort of the chase cards of this set as it were). You have to kick, hop, and skip, or at least I did, around the many beach balls to get to the dude, and the app. It’s quite a head-trip, in part because of what Jennifer’s saying about our lives in 2026—everything’s an app, everything’s a dude using an app, everything’s a play-pit to wade through for a chance to save a buck you probably never planned to spend anyways—and what she’s doing given that context, building a playful and at times unnerving examination of vulnerability and communicative agency.
The app, Attune, is sort of a pro-social thought reorganization machine for the anxious among us. Plug in a message before you send it, and it tells you what you’re about to do wrong: pushiness, avoidance, grandstanding. It then, through what feels like a Claude layer (Claude, Mortal Enemy of Em Dash Heads), suggests a more direct and even-keeled rewrite. As someone who works through 2-3 revisions on just about any text or email, I felt a little too seen by the machine. I had early access to a web-based version, but it’s available on the iOS and Google Play app stores. You can get a free month of access, after having fun with the beach balls, by scanning a huge printed QR code in the back of the gallery—there’s a large painting beside it, FREE FOR A MONTH (2026), which says exactly that in thick black oil paint—or by using the promo code FREEWEEK. After that, it’s $12.99 a month. I don’t have the gall to check, but could this be the world’s first recurring subscription artwork?
Beyond trying it yourself, there’s the dude (Young Man With Phone, 2026). The dude (presently—and through the 31st—there is a different dude, cycling in and out) sits or lays on the ground looking at his phone, his number printed on the wall. You can text him if you want. He is the demo unit for Attune, and he’s supposed to consider using the app to respond, but as far as I’m aware he doesn’t have to. As a Young Man With Phone myself, I felt a lot of kinship with the dude, and wanted to be his friend. With the opening on the night of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, I texted the dude about the Knicks, to which he responded in a cosmically neutral if positively dismissive manner (we both ended up being wrong):
I emailed Jennifer a few questions before the show opened, which she very kindly responded to. That brief interview is below:
ominouswooshing: I’m a Gen Z-er who fell into the art media world a few years ago, so it’s been fascinating and gut-wrenching to watch as these forces I’ve watched develop since my pre-teen years—lone wolf & hive mind masculinity, tech spectacle, the outsourcing of thought, the anxiety over social perception, the rise of collectibles and predictive gambling—intersect and affect both the making and the business of art. The “art world” has always been dominated by macho men, but as one generation ages out and younger tech/finance money trickles in, it feels vital to interrogate the end state of art-as-consumer-product under technocracy. I’m curious how you arrived at these concepts in this new work, and whether there was any kind of catalyzing observation that led you there?
Jennifer Rubell: My default mode is observing the world and trying to make sense of what I see. This movement toward everything becoming a consumable – people, places, things, you-name-it – is the kind of subject matter I find interesting. I’m less compelled to critique it than to expose it in a way that we can really look at, as opposed to just accepting it as a fact of life, like weather. The whole exhibition is about taking the framework of something consumable, i.e. the app, and applying it to something profoundly human, the act of connecting to someone else. Our texts are filled with insecurity and self-defeat, the very human stuff that comes out whenever we connect with other humans. That’s a beautiful, vulnerable moment where art is likely to live.
ow: Secondly, I’m curious about Attune. What led you to the chatbot as a form, and how do you see it existing/developing once it’s on people’s phones, away from the bounds of the gallery? How have people who’ve used Attune reacted to it?
JR: It’s an app that helps you understand what your text is really saying about you (often, not something you want the recipient to know), and gives you an edit you can send instead. All my work is participatory, meaning that all my work engages with viewers in this collaborative way. I’ve used food, performance, sculpture, to do this. An app is just another medium, one particularly suited to collaborative work. Many people who’ve used attune have been surprised by how insightful it is. It can make you feel a little naked. It’s uncanny like that. It still makes ME feel that way. It’s astonishing how much we reveal ourselves through our texts. It’s like an invisible layer of emotional self-disclosure we wrap around everything we send. Truly fascinating.
ow: On similar ground, how did you arrive at the product launch/pop-up as a form for the exhibition? (It’s especially interesting as these “demo stations” appear at art fairs—the last time I went to Art Basel Miami Beach in 2024, I watched a whole room of VIPs fumble with Meta glasses in the dark.) I’m particularly interested to hear how you came to the three individual demos/activities, which all feel scarily adjacent to real things I hear about from the San Francisco VC scene.
JR: I’ve been mesmerized by tech launches since Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer did that dance on stage for the launch of Windows 95 in 1995. It was this weird combination of cheesy sales convention marketing and authentic glee. And at the same time, I remember Vito Acconci telling me that the only reason Ileana Sonnabend let him do Seedbed (1972) was to get people in the building so they could buy Jasper Johns paintings from Leo Castelli. Two different worlds, same concept. I wanted the show surrounding the launch of attune to pull from both these histories. The tech world and the art world have big similarities: both involve businesses that exist as cultural institutions, both are surprisingly personal considering how significant they are. Both are this weird combination of creative exuberance and sales. I wanted my show to live right inside that nexus.
ow: I have to ask about Baller. I have some guesses about the various implications the beach balls present, but I’m curious how and when the idea to use them came to you, specifically the 250 signed balls? Do you see them as being closer to art-objects, collectibles, or gallery ephemera? Or, is it some combination of the three? I’m looking forward to seeing how people physically and emotionally interact with them in Meredith’s space, especially given the potential for speculative value, but I’m also curious how they’ll change in meaning over the duration of the exhibition.
JR: Beach balls are mostly air. I love the idea of collectibles that are mostly air, reminds me of Duchamp’s 50cc of Paris Air (1919). And at the same time, they’re classic merch. The website where we got them advertised some beach balls imprinted with NVIDIA’s logo. Mine weren’t commercially printed. I rubber-stamped all of them with the attune logo, like I was giving them my seal of approval, but also making each of them completely unique, i.e. more collectible. It’s a kind of visual joke that’s also dead serious. They really are collectible. They really are merch. The whole show blurs the line between the two. I mean, really, what’s the difference between merch and a collectible? The price? The beach balls are free. Whatever money will ever be made by selling them, I won’t get any of it. And one of them gives you free attune for life. That might prove to be the most valuable of all :-)
Thank you to Jennifer for answering my questions, and to Meredith and Grace for encouraging me to put them somewhere. And thanks to you for reading! I’ll be back this time next week with a heatwave show roundup and we’ll just keep truckin’ on from there.