The guy you’re sexting on OnlyFans might be a guy. That’s the uncomfortable idea at the center of the artwork that just took one of Frieze London’s top prizes for young artists. According to The Observer‘s Lily Isaacs, London artist Ella Fleck spent six weeks undercover among OnlyFans “chatters,” the mostly male workers hired to message fans while pretending to be the models, and turned what she learned into an installation called training material (aria).

A prize, and a solo show

According to Frieze, Fleck won the 2026 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award for the piece, which she showed in the fair’s Focus section with Los Angeles gallery Ehrlich Steinberg. The award comes with her first solo exhibition at a London institution, and The Observer reports that show will open at Camden Art Centre in 2028.

The jury, made up of Camden Art Centre director Martin Clark, senior exhibitions curator Gina Buenfeld-Murley and Laura Smith of the Hepworth Wakefield, said the work used “installation, sculpture, sound and scent to make public the usually hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce.”

Inside the chatter job

Frieze describes the outfit Fleck trained with as a “parasite company,” a third-party agency that runs subscriber messages for female creators through scripted conversation and impersonation. She went in as a man. According to British GQ‘s Zinya Salfiti, Fleck built a persona named Elliot and put in six to eight hours a day of unpaid training, which she found through Reddit threads, then a Telegram channel and finally a Discord server.

She told GQ the training felt almost like school, with typing speed tests, grammar tests and group simulations where trainees argued over how to reply to a pretend subscriber and what to sell him. The core rule she was handed: “Your job is not to casually chat. Your job is to create emotional engagement that converts into spending.”

One phrase was off limits. Fleck said chatters were told they would be fired on the spot if they ever told a fan “I love you.” She also described fans paying for everything from talk about their dream house to a 40-line poem about how great they are.

The idea for the project started with a friend’s story. Both outlets report that a creator Fleck knew believed she had hired a boutique agency in Italy staffed by women, only to learn it was really a group of men in Leeds.

What visitors walk into

The installation puts that hidden labor on a stage. Per The Observer, the floor is made of metal panels taken from data centers and fitted with bass shakers, so it vibrates under visitors’ feet. Frieze says a steady stream of male voices performing versions of the chatter scripts comes up through that platform, and some of the tiles are see-through, showing the cables and pipes underneath. The space is also scented with a bubblegum industrial odor masker and a synthetic male pheromone.

Fleck told The Observer that the men she trained with had “conflicting feelings” about the work, finding it “absurd and funny” but sometimes “uncomfortable.” “They didn’t want to tell their girlfriends about it, but they really wanted to make money,” she said.

Clark told the paper the piece “made visible the manipulation and deception” of a “taboo, hidden world” without judging the people in it. “It speaks to the idea that maybe we all want to be deceived,” he said.

The takeaway

Chatter agencies have been an open secret in the creator economy for a while, but it says something when the art world hands out a major prize for pulling back the curtain. For fans, it’s a reminder that the intimacy they’re paying for may be scripted by a team. For creators, it’s a fresh push to think hard about who is speaking in their name, and whether their subscribers would be okay with it.

Image: Lifting a raised floor tile at the Blue Waters computing facility, photo by Elizabeth K. Joseph (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.