Sex, drugs and social media – Hooked review

Science Gallery, London
Sugar, shopping, cash, drugs, booze and smartphones " this great show details how artists have responded - and succumbed - to addictive vices down the ages

Can you become addicted to getting a bunch of psychedelic cats aligned in a row? I've got to admit it gave me a warm glow when I "won" while playing an interactive artwork by Katriona Beales that mimics online gambling. The pleasure persisted even when her "game" informed me it had been compiling data based on my eye movements.

Yet, as sickly diverting as it is, I can't imagine waiting on a street corner, $26 in my hand, to buy the next hit of online cat portraits from my man. Hooked: When Want Becomes Need, the thought-provoking show that opens London's new Science Gallery, mixes artworks about drug and alcohol addiction with pieces that explore the online world. It suggests that smartphones and social media may be as addictive - and harmful - as heroin or vodka. Yet the exhibition also illuminates a striking difference. While artists once turned to traditional narcotics for romantic inspiration, the compulsion to check that phone one more time is hardly going to give anyone visions of caverns measureless to man, as Coleridge put it.