Smooth Talk

By Sammi Gale

Life is bottlenose smooth. Unbearably so: from one-tap groceries scooted to your door to data-driven living, Generative AI decision-making to infinite scrolls, we now live under the twin tyrants of ‘Always be optimising’ and never having to lift a finger. We are left with betterment burnout. Easiness ennui. As life becomes smoother, faster, more optimised, we mistake the removal of friction for freedom — and then find ourselves bored, impotent, and aesthetically numbed, scrambling to reintroduce difficulty in symbolic or cosmetic ways.

"we now live under the twin tyrants of ‘Always be optimising’ and never having to lift a finger"

No wonder some are turning to ‘friction-maxxing.’ Coined by Kathryn Jezer-Morton in a January 2026 article for The Cut, the term describes a minor revolt against convenience. The idea is to do things the hard way, consequently reintroducing an ounce of resilience, focus, and meaning back into daily life. Jezer-Morton argues that we need to build up a tolerance for inconvenience or risk being further infantilised — dependent, manipulatable, chronically dissatisfied.

Going to the shops instead of ordering delivery. Walking rather than summoning a car. Getting lost without recourse to Google Maps. Advancing conspicuously modest interventions, friction-maxxing is in the same lineage as ‘rawdogging’ — the term for experiencing something without mediation, like enduring a longhaul flight with nothing but the flight map — both in the literal sense of foregoing tools and in the secondary sense of generating a micro-movement largely for jokes and traffic. The terminology may change, but the symptoms persist: life has become so frictionless that unmediated experience now registers primarily as a stunt.

Nowhere is the fantasy of frictionlessness more visible than in contemporary art. On the one hand, some museums and galleries have foregrounded labour, craft, visible effort: think, Magdalene Odundo’s hand‑worked ceramic vessels, Olga de Amaral’s woven tapestries – or on view at the time of writing, Anya Painstil’s tufted textiles (Ames Yavuz) and Jessica Rankin’s embroidered paintings (White Cube). On the flipside, a proliferation of artists embrace strategic laziness and studied indifference, the appearance of no effort at all. These gestures tend to read differently depending on where the artist is in her career: established creatives, with market weight, drop tat – David Shrigley’s old rope, Maurizio Cattelan’s Gaffa-taped banana – to send up the market and findom their collectors.

"As life becomes smoother, faster, more optimised, we mistake the removal of friction for freedom"

Exhibitions of work by emerging artists, meanwhile, are likewise brimming with found objects. But with more ambivalence towards the nasty business of being collected, these works end up reading less ‘found’ than bumped into: Oh, this? I just found this. What’s more, these found-thises are barely even installed, instead displayed at apparently incidental angles, having breezed in and settled, just so. My eyes cannot help but roll at the silly charade, no matter how edgy the battered hubcap might look smiling back at me under the track lighting. Going beyond the sprezzatura of the Renaissance court, Duchamp’s readymades, and Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing — these latest gestures are cultural adaptations to a frictionless world, where effort and absence of effort are strategies rather than aesthetics. It’s as if artworks are being staged not only to be seen but to survive platform logic – algorithmic ranking, attention scarcity, scroll-speed legibility – to perform nonchalance while reading instantly.

"artworks are being staged not only to be seen but to survive platform logic"

This logic extends beyond galleries into the broader visual culture. Kyle Chayka notes a similar shift on Instagram: singular, curated images have given way to performative, algorithmically optimised photo dumps. Brands have got the memo too, celebrating wonky foods, junk journaling, and typos; billboards that seem to have ‘just woken up like this’.

These inauthentic accidents desperately inject 'imperfection’ into the Teflon™ of our spooky-smooth lives – but the serendipity doesn’t quite register, we recipients somehow sensing its artfulness. In 2026, visual culture across the board is caught in the tension between labour, absence, and the appearance of effort: and with frictionlessness now being adopted by advertising, thus going mainstream, the idea that visual artists might have to put in even more effort for their work to appear effortless exhausts me even to think about.

I started 2026 with the New Year’s Resolution to write more with pen and paper – the idea being to reduce screen time and see if the slower pace, nostalgic wrist ache and ink stains, led to better thinking and focus. Not only have I not made good on that one, I ran an earlier draft of this piece through Chat GPT– partly as an experiment, but partly if I’m honest as a hopeful attempt to get all the Is dotted and Ts crossed in a couple clicks.  

It didn’t work – emotionally, or editorially – and ironically this tool I thought could make my life easier ended up setting me back a few hours as I tried to excise the robo-platitudes from my stumbling thoughts. Ryan Broderick put it well in a recent Garbage Day, ‘It’s not a matter of just “generating” something perfect from my head, but exploring the tension that exists between what I’m imagining and the limitations of my stupid meat body.’ It seems wild to fetishise friction, difficulty and inconvenience for its own sake – it’s tough enough out here, as it is – equally, the blind pursuit of optimisation for the promise of freedom is a trap. Not only that, sub-optimal is often more optimal: show me a travelator better than a few bumps on the open road.