Jennifer Rubell's Attune Official at Meredith Rosen Gallery

 By BIANCA BOVA July 6th, 2026

Attune Official, Jennifer Rubell's most recent solo exhibition at Meredith Rosen Gallery, opened with a launch party celebrating the release of her new AI texting app, Attune. The space gallery goers enter conveys with exceptional accuracy the feeling of the aftermath of just that kind of party—built on hype, full of excesses, adulatory of something vague and nonphysical.

Attune is a real app, intended "for the moment before you send a text."  In function all it does is rewrite your texts before you send them, but it purports to "identify the social move you may not realize you're making, then rewrite your message in your own voice, clearer, sharper, and more attuned to your intentions." Not only does it provide the rewrite, it provides feedback intended to induce you to "notice hidden patterns in your communication" and "reduce overexplaining, apologizing, or hedging." Per its preview in the App Store, this guidance comes in the form of nonsense labeling like somedaying ("you're using later to avoid now"); pre losing ("calling it before they can"); and semi selling ("undercutting...before they get a chance to like it"). The app goes for $129.99, billed annually, or $12.99 per month, billed monthly. One must reconcile with the fact that there are very likely people out there using it, right now, who are unaware of its origins as a work of conceptual art.  

Visitors to the gallery can scan the QR code on the deliberately scrawly diptych, Free for a Month, to get Attune for just that. The painting smacks of try-hard contemporary marketing aesthetics, acutely familiar to anyone who has spent this summer in a city besieged by those faux-graffiti rental insurance billboards. Along an adjacent wall at periodic intervals appears Young Man with Phone, a participatory performance work featuring a rotating cast of twenty-something everymans seated on the floor, slouched over their phones. The performer's phone number is available to gallery goers, and they can text him anything they please. He can (but is under no real obligation to) respond. Of course, if he feels unsure of how to respond, he has at his disposal Attune. This is Rubell at her best, the Rubell of Engagement and Send in the Clowns, the artist who at once demands nothing and blithely offers up opportunities for her audience to strip themselves of their dignity in order to live out, just briefly, their personal iteration of some facile, universal fantasy. 

In order to view these works up close, one must physically wade through the space, ankle deep in the thousands of beach balls that constitute the final piece in the show, Baller. Each beachball is hand-stamped with the Attune logo, with the exception of 250 which are limited edition collectors' items bearing the artist's signature, and one which grants lifetime access to the app. Visitors to the show are free to take as many of the beach balls as they can carry when they go. The installation embodies both the tacky, mass-produced nonsensical merch that pervades almost every industry these days (secondary market T-Mobile spatula, anyone?), as well as the gamification employed by companies in increasingly desperate attempts to force engagement from audiences with diminishing attention spans. 

Attune Official walks the tightrope between being a send-up of contemporary tech culture and an active participant in it. One might be forgiven for thinking of it as parody, were it not for the execution and availability of the app. That actionable commitment to the premise, paired with Rubell's subtle wit and sincerity save the show from being interpreted as being outright cynical, and allow it to read as something more complex, something slightly frightening: a show that suggests that perhaps the contours it identifies that define the differences between the two worlds it occupies just don't matter. 

Attune Offical is on view at Meredith Rosen Gallery June 3-July 31, 2026
327 West 36th Street, Floor 6
New York, NY 10018