Attention Otherwise: ADHD, Art Labor, and the Institutions That Depend on It

Leaving the Deficit Model Behind

The art world has never been organized around “normal” attention. From the mythologized figure of the obsessive painter to the curator who operates by intuition rather than protocol, artistic labor has long depended on modes of perception that resist linear focus, sustained administrative discipline, and standardized productivity. Yet in contemporary discourse, these same modes of attention are increasingly named and managed under the diagnostic category of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

This naming has produced a paradox. On the one hand, ADHD is overwhelmingly framed through deficit: as dysfunction, impairment, or failure to meet institutional norms. On the other, a counter-narrative has emerged—particularly in creative industries—celebrating ADHD as a “superpower,” a source of exceptional creativity and innovation. Both positions are ultimately inadequate. The first erases capacity; the second instrumentalizes difference.

This article argues for a third position, grounded in recent psychological research and critical disability theory: ADHD is best understood as a relational condition whose effects—disabling or enabling—are produced through specific environments, expectations, and labor structures. In the art world, ADHD-related traits can function as strengths not inherently, but contingently—when institutional conditions align with certain modes of attention, and become disabling when they do not.

Rather than asking whether ADHD is a deficit or a gift, this essay asks a more difficult question:
What does the art world already extract from ADHD-like modes of attention, and why does it refuse responsibility for sustaining them?

Relational Disability and Attention as Cultural Technology

This essay draws implicitly and explicitly on the social and relational models of disability, which locate disability not solely in individual bodies or minds, but in the interaction between difference and environment. ADHD, within this frame, is not reducible to neurological variation alone. It is produced as disabling or enabling through cultural norms of time, productivity, communication, and value.

At the same time, the art world complicates a purely social model. Artistic labor does not simply exclude non-normative attention; it often depends on it. What is at stake, then, is not inclusion versus exclusion, but selective incorporation: the extraction of creative value from atypical attention without corresponding care, accommodation, or structural support.

Attention itself must therefore be understood not as a neutral cognitive resource, but as a cultural technology—shaped, disciplined, rewarded, or punished according to institutional priorities. ADHD exposes the ideological nature of “normal” attention by failing to conform to it, while simultaneously generating forms of perception the art world prizes.

Strengths, Awareness, and Well-Being

Recent large-scale psychological research has begun to systematically examine psychological strengths in adults with ADHD, rather than focusing exclusively on deficits. When adults with and without ADHD are asked to assess their identification with a range of positive traits—such as creativity, humor, intuitiveness, spontaneity, and deep task engagement—two findings are particularly relevant.

First, adults with ADHD tend to endorse certain traits more strongly, particularly those associated with divergent thinking and intense engagement with personally meaningful tasks. Second, across diagnostic categories, individuals who recognize and actively use their strengths report higher subjective well-being, better quality of life, and fewer symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress.

These findings do not claim that ADHD confers universal advantage, nor that such traits are exclusive to ADHD. Rather, they suggest that strengths become protective only when they are consciously identified and structurally supported. This distinction is critical in the art world, where talent is frequently celebrated while the conditions required to sustain it are ignored.

Practice-Based, Ecological Analysis

The case studies presented here are not intended as heroic exemplars or statistical evidence. They function as practice-based vignettes, drawn from recurring patterns observed across contemporary artistic labor. Their purpose is analytical rather than anecdotal: to illuminate how ADHD-related traits interact with specific art-world structures, producing either viability or collapse.

When ADHD Becomes Capacity—and When It Becomes Harm

I. Hyperfocus and the Studio Economy

Hyperfocus—often described as the ability to sustain deep concentration on tasks of intrinsic interest—is frequently cited as an ADHD-related strength. In studio practice, this capacity can enable extraordinary productivity, rapid decision-making, and immersive engagement with material processes. Painters, sculptors, and media artists often describe periods of intense absorption in which work advances dramatically.

Yet hyperfocus is also physiologically and psychologically costly. Without external boundaries, it can lead to neglect of bodily needs, disrupted sleep, and burnout. In an art economy that rewards output but ignores care, hyperfocus becomes a form of self-extraction.

When artists redesign their practice to treat hyperfocus as a bounded resource—protected, scheduled, and paired with administrative containment—it becomes sustainable. When institutions implicitly demand it without support, it becomes disabling. The difference is not neurological; it is structural.

II. Curatorial Attention as Distributed Cognition

Curatorial labor increasingly depends on the ability to synthesize disparate practices, disciplines, and publics. ADHD-related modes of attention—often labeled distractibility—can function instead as distributed cognition, scanning wide conceptual fields and identifying unexpected correspondences.

Curators who work this way frequently excel at programming, live events, and thematic innovation, yet struggle with bureaucratic continuity and institutional pacing. Without visual systems, collaborative delegation, and recovery time, these roles become untenable.

Here, ADHD does not conflict with curatorial intelligence; it conflicts with institutional design.

III. Novelty, Play, and Creative Labor Markets

Many artists with ADHD report a collapse of motivation once a problem is conceptually solved. This is often framed as unreliability or lack of discipline. Yet in commercial illustration, design, and performance contexts, novelty-seeking can drive rapid ideation, stylistic innovation, and audience engagement.

When workflows are structured to incorporate constraint, play, and iterative novelty, ADHD-related motivation patterns become productive rather than destabilizing. When forced into repetitive, standardized pipelines, they collapse.

Again, the condition is relational.

Against the “Strengths” Trap: Disability, Severity, and Power

Any discussion of ADHD strengths must confront a crucial ethical risk: not all people with ADHD experience these traits as strengths, and many experience severe impairment compounded by comorbid autism, learning disabilities, trauma, or chronic illness. For these individuals, celebratory narratives can feel not empowering but erasing.

The problem is not the identification of strengths; it is their prescription. Strengths-based discourse becomes harmful when it:

• Assumes universality
• Minimizes impairment
• Shifts responsibility onto individuals
• Justifies institutional neglect

In the art world, this risk is amplified. Celebrating neurodivergent creativity while maintaining exploitative labor conditions transforms “strength” into another alibi for precarity.

Institutional Responsibility and the Political Economy of Attention

The contemporary art world already relies heavily on ADHD-compatible labor: obsessive production cycles, unpaid intensity, emotional overinvestment, and irregular rhythms of work. What it resists is responsibility.

Administrative labor is externalized. Burnout is individualized. Accommodation is reframed as exception rather than infrastructure. In this context, ADHD-related strengths are not merely undervalued; they are selectively exploited.

A genuinely strengths-based art ecology would require institutional shifts, including:

• Flexible temporal structures
• Alternative evaluative formats
• Embedded administrative support
• Explicit norms rather than hidden expectations
• Recognition of nonlinear productivity

These changes would not dilute excellence. They would redefine it.

Attention Otherwise as Critical Insight

ADHD does not guarantee creativity, nor does it doom artistic practice. It reveals something more unsettling: that the norms governing attention, productivity, and value in the art world are neither natural nor neutral.

Art has always depended on forms of attention that exceed regulation. What ADHD makes visible is the contradiction at the heart of cultural production: the simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of non-normative minds.

To engage ADHD seriously in the art world is not to romanticize it, nor to pathologize it, but to confront the conditions under which attention itself becomes viable.

Art, at its best, has always practiced attention otherwise. The question is whether the institutions that sustain art are willing to do the same.

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