https://spikeartmagazine.com Articles from Spike Art Magazine en Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:03:21 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/images/favicons/favicon-32x32.png https://spikeartmagazine.com https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/news-spike-spirituality-out-now
For our Summer 2026 issue, amid the latest revival of SPIRITUALITY in culture, Spike asked: what are people reaching for beyond what can be measured? The answers are eclectic, emphatic, and most of all personal: Johanna Hedva’s essay about the human voice’s part in the divine; portraits of mystic artists Lee “Scratch” Perry, Natasha Tontey, and Santiago Yahuarcani by Isis Semaj-Hall, Riar Rizaldi, and Miguel A. López; Jamieson Webster’s psychoanalytic look at Renaissance painting’s body of Christ; a spiritual history of perfumes by Élisabeth de Feydeau; Patrick McGraw’s soulful reading of America’s (perhaps) greatest living author, Joy Williams; queries of Gen Z’s search for God by Lamorna Ash, the disappearance of atheism by Steven Phillips-Horst, and a new form of contemplation by Aodhan Madden; and LIFEMAXXING recommendations to purge the soul, sometimes devilishly. Plus, some backpage words of wisdom from Tea Hačić-Vlahović: “Devotion and humiliation are holy.”]]> Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/news-spike-spirituality-out-now https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-fotografiska-bruce-gilden
Like him or not, Bruce Gilden (*1946) has spent nearly six decades doing what most photographers wouldn’t dare: getting as close to his subject as humanly possible. His exhibition “Why These?” now on view at Fotografiska Berlin, gathers forty-one pictures selected by the artist, spanning his early black-and-white street photos through his more recent shift to large-format digital color images. The first thing Bruce said to me when I entered his sunny, plant-filled home in upstate New York, where he lives with his wife, Sophie, was, “I’m not in the mood.” The second thing he said was, “You look like a Democrat,” while arresting me with a puckish smirk. We spoke about the creative potential of the body’s limitations, whether confrontation can be its own form of empathy, and why street fighting is the perfect analogy for making his best work. Danielle Ezzo: You’re known for your physical approach to shooting. Is that still true at age seventy-nine? Bruce Gilden: Look, you have to live. Th]]> Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-fotografiska-bruce-gilden https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-co-berlin-the-lure-of-the-image
In 2009, when I was twelve years old, I fell in love on the internet, behind a screen. Every morning, I thought of the single picture I had of Thomas: the one on his Twitter profile. After months of epistolary exchange through DMs, I learned the hard way that Thomas did not exist. He was a fabricated identity, created by a girl named Angelina, who used photos of a real boy named Maël to deceive young girls online. If Thomas, the version I had imagined, was not real, the mistrust, the pain, and the disillusion certainly were. As the tales say, the word “lure” refers to a falconer’s decoy: a bundle of feathers, sometimes stuffed with meat, attached to a cord and swung through the air to call back a hawk. Not prey, but an imitation of it. A training device. Such entanglements are at the heart of “The Lure of the Image,” an exhibition at C|O Berlin that, in its many angles and approaches, seems to guide the viewer through the terms and conditions of their own deception. In Jenny Rova’s (*1]]> Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-co-berlin-the-lure-of-the-image https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-florentina-holzinger-pfingstspiel
Florentina Holzinger’s (*1986) work has always operated beyond: beyond body politics, beyond feminism, beyond spectacle, and beyond logistics. As her productions have scaled up in recent years, the significance of stunts therein has intensified. Once aesthetic references or dramaturgical climaxes, these daredevil acts have become almost standard in her repertoire, executed with a precision that cultural conservatives are wont to read as an entertainment hallmark, and dismissively so. Even those who claim that her work is only about shock value, with all its gory self-mutilations and copious nudity, can’t deny that it leaves you with a strong bodily response: a fainting spell, possibly, and at least an electrifying feeling in one’s bones. Your first Holzinger watch is an experience that sticks. At the beginning of her Pfingstspiel (Pentecost Play, 2026), a for sure cost collaboration between Wiener Festwochen and the Nitsch Foundation (as well as a satellite event to her Austrian Pavill]]> Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-florentina-holzinger-pfingstspiel https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/podcast-the-secrets-of-success
In the debut Spike Podcast, two “rival” columnists banter about Insta-galleries, critical discomfort, the star signs of poems, and the fact that artists are people, too.]]> Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/podcast-the-secrets-of-success https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-the-abstraction-of-everything
Years ago, on a cross-country drive, I was taking a shower at a campsite. Water beaded on the chrome fixtures, crane flies flapped in the corners. Just one droplet spread the cold overhead light in such complex ways – what would it take for a video game to render photorealistic water in real time? You’d have to simulate every molecule, if not atom; calculate how every particle and ray of light weaves through the matrix of H2O and strikes our retinas and sets in motion the whole hallucinatory chain of vision. Anything less than that would be an abstraction. I remembered this reverie in early June, at the 2026 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), as I surveyed a sea of people clinging to their round lunch tables in the Denver Convention Center. Who were they? Why were they there? Students presented their research and angled for PhD sponsors, or chatted up recruiters from Meta or Waymo. At least three startups had a self-driving big rig parked inside their booth. As ]]> Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-the-abstraction-of-everything https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-all-images-are-quite-useless-now
— A version of this essay was originally published, under the title “What Are Images Now?” in our Spring 2026 issue, “Everything’s Computer.” Order your glossy print copy or an instantly downloadable e-paper from our online shop — Before Adam and Eve disobey God and eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they are described as naked, but not ashamed. Immediately after, they hide their nakedness, suddenly self-aware and self-conscious. Genesis 3:7: “The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” Then, they hide from God. Genesis 3:9: “And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” Knowledge, it appears, requires separation. The apple, it seems, was laced with images; most notably, that of the self. The myth of The Fall is a fabulist articulation of what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan c]]> Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-all-images-are-quite-useless-now https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-alexandre-estrela-venice-biennale
The centerpiece of RedSkyFalls, Alexandre Estrela’s (*Lisbon, 1971) show at the Portuguese Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale (2026), is a gigantic screen displaying an idyllic landscape: still water, reflecting bright autumn trees against snow-capped peaks. It feels both familiar and strangely vague, until it clicks – it’s the stock wallpaper from a 2017 Apple operating system, capturingNorth Lake in California’s High Sierra mountains. And, for those who are oblivious to the reference, the cursor is there too. “Pure appropriation,” Estrela jokes. “Just a screenshot of my own computer.” Then, suddenly, an earthquake somewhere in the world triggers a violent burst of sound in the room, and the entire exhibition responds. The season inside the desktop image shifts; autumn is gone, replaced all at once by spring. Distributed around the room are Réplicas: six smaller screens showing digitally animated tiny creatures, sketched with a zany, raw, abstract quality. Though they may not be imm]]> Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-alexandre-estrela-venice-biennale https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-brognon-rollin-konschthal-esch-2026
Max Dax: It’s common practice to call for a minute’s silence whenever a catastrophe occurs or someone famous dies. For instance, in a football stadium, people will stand in silence to commemorate that moment or person. Your concept for a jukebox is extraordinary. You have started to collect hundreds of such minutes of silence for your epic conceptual work 24h Silence. David Brognon: Yes. The idea is to collect twenty-four hours of silence, which equates to 1,440 minutes. Stéphanie Rollin: If every minute of silence relates to someone’s death or a major catastrophe, our jukeboxes will become an encyclopaedia of deaths and disasters. MD: There must have been a moment when you started this project. DB: Stéphanie and I have been working together for twenty years, and, looking back, we have always focused on the perception of time and duration in specific situations affecting large numbers of people. In that sense, we have always felt as if we were transmitters. Shortly after the Paris terr]]> Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-brognon-rollin-konschthal-esch-2026 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-danh-vo-stedelijk
With a practice that consists primarily of collecting artifacts (of empire, of ancient history, of war and peace), every Danh Võ (*1975) exhibition takes the form of a retrospective. It also imbricates his own lineage and early experiences of displacement – born in South Vietnam only months after the Fall of Saigon, he fled by boat with his family in 1979, bound for the US, only to be picked up and rerouted to Denmark – and his splicing, rearranging, and recontextualizing of objects present images and narratives familiar to a museum context, yet also fragmentary and unnerving. Võ’s new exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, “πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα)” brings together sculptural compositions and arrangements dating back two decades, including many of his best-known works, with the artist himself given curatorial carte blanche. The commanding elements of this retrospective-in-a-room, though, and what really materialize Võ’s soft form of (institutional) critique, are various mechanisms of]]> Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-danh-vo-stedelijk https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-33-band
33 offers unsteady music for unsteady times, delivered with a preternatural sense of the ways that space, light, and sound can come together, offering transcendence. The group, founded by Billy Bultheel (*1987) and Alexander Iezzi (*1987) in 2021, recently doubled in size with the addition of Ivan Cheng (*1991) and Cem Dukkha (*1991). Their new album, Tripolar (2026, Haunter Records) was forged from the sonic shards of marathon recording sessions during a Berlin residency where the artists “put everything on the table,” from niche industrial-music references to hurdy gurdies. The nine-track album lurches from baroque string arrangements to squelching synth lines to a queer, dirge-like closing ballad “Babymusicc.” On lead single “Worry Days,” Iezzi sings “It pains me so” in a Trent Reznor-esque wail. The accompanying video reads like security camera footage of an alien invasion at their studio – fitting images for their own paranormal music activity. Equally important to 33’s growing lo]]> Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-33-band https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-helsinki
These days, there’s a Week every other week. Most prominent are Art Week, Fashion Week, Design Week – the tricolore ice cream of creative industry PR. Square, heavily branded, and bland in three different ways. Could this be any different? Even before my arrival at Helsinki Music Week (HMW), I’d already been mistaken for a Finn twice, addressed in the distinctly esoteric, clip-clop lyricism only the Suomi language can verbalize. First stop on my stacked itinerary: dinner in a former tar shed on a “hidden island.” We’re around eight “VIPs” plus our lovely host, Martta Louekari, making conversation, awkwardly at first, on this large granite rock in the Baltic Sea. A few glasses in and things get more interesting. I’m told that, in the Finnish language, one can can write a poem in a single word. Our meal is served to a live set by Lasse Pietiläinen and Aapo Tapio Soulanto, flute-meets-synthesizer ambient. Me and my new entourage hop in a Sprinter van, dressed seats-to-roof in tangerine, h]]> Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-helsinki https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/image-gallery-various-others-2026
A view-master tour of a very long weekend in artville Munich, from quantum physics and art for kids to a high-octane gallery crossover and painting’s key signatures from the Weimar Republic.]]> Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/image-gallery-various-others-2026 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-architecture-new-museum
You may have heard: the New Museum has opened a new addition, designed by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) founder Rem Koolhaas and partner Shohei Shigematsu. In case you haven’t: the €70 million expansion to the museum building on New York’s Bowery is 5,500 square meters of new space, nearly doubling the size of its galleries. Early reviews have mostly focused on its craftsmanship – or a lack thereof, as critics have pointed out that some construction details, such as railings in the new grand stair, were covered in packing tape on opening night. Good for lots of clap emojis online, to be sure. Project architect Jake Forster told me that OMA petitioned the museum to hold the opening until July, but that larger forces, such as a need for revenue after a two-year-long closure, as well as a home for a new annual cohort of NEW INC residents in the museum’s cultural incubator, were deemed more urgent than tending to final touches, many of which have been cleaned up since March. D]]> Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-architecture-new-museum https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-never-midcurve
Surely, we’re living in the century of American humiliation, I think, approaching the twenty-minute mark while queuing for a recent Beeple opening. It’s a beautiful late April evening in Palo Alto, where a line around the block is common for something like a “pop-up concept café” and unthinkable for an art vernissage. It’s the most Balenciaga I’ve seen in this corner of the Bay Area, though the ratio of fleece vests and down jackets to designer threads is giving moneyed degen. Killing time as the line inches along, I ask the gentleman ahead of me if he’s a Beeple fan. He gushes with affection for the artist’s practice, enumerating virtues that are really quite moving. Art for the people. Emotional honesty. Searing social critique. And so on. That is, until he starts to rave about the artist’s anonymity and his affinity for spray paint and I realize that he thinks we’re here for Banksy. “INFINITE_LOOP,” billed as Beeple’s first mid-career survey, is a Nam June Paik-ish, or maybe Times S]]> Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-never-midcurve https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-quiet-venice
The 61st Venice Biennale is a festival of death, as this is how the living keep the dead alive. There was the last work of visionary polymath Alexander Kluge (1932–2026) memorialized in the Holy See Pavilion; a characteristically deadpan presentation by the late Ceal Floyer (1968–2025) at the Palazzo Diedo; and, of course, the deeply moving “furnishing” of the German Pavilion’s central gallery by Henrike Naumann (1984–2026) – more on this later. There was also Gabrielle Goliath’s latest iteration of Elegy (2015–), an endless mourning ritual for Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in October 2023. This tragedy was put into its political context by a protest of the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) in front of the Israeli Pavilion and the Arsenale, of Pussy Riot in front of the Russian Pavilion, and the organized strike across Biennale venues on day three of the preview. The Palestinian flag was a recurring apparition: in the installation we are ]]> Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-quiet-venice https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-berlin
In Turkish there is a word for weather like this: limonata havası, lemonade weather. Sunny enough to get sunburned, cold enough to need a jacket. The forecast for Gallery Weekend Berlin is more or less the same. I meet Kate Brown and Zaida Violan outside Trautwein Herleth and we begin our tour. Stella Zhong has built a large oval structure in the main room, with two small openings cut into the shell. The work is inside; the only way to see it is to peek through the holes. I peek, and see nothing, while a gallery director keeps talking about the work. I look again, and still don’t understand it. Later, on the gallery iPad, artwork images are actually pretty impressive. These minimalist, miniature sculptures carry a new formalism that you’re not bothered by how alien they are. I would have liked to have seen those in person. Next door at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Brook Hsu has cut windows into the gallery’s plaster walls, reconnecting formerly divided rooms. Inside the conjured space sits ]]> Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-berlin https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-douglas-gordon-by-douglas-gordon
Douglas Gordon was not in attendance at the premiere, in February at the Berlinale, of Finlay Pretsell’s documentary Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon (2026). Perhaps this was for the best. Art, after all – forever insecure about its position vis-à-vis popular media – has a particularly skittish relationship to its depiction on the silver screen. Yves Klein died following a heart attack he suffered, aged thirty-four, after attending the 1962 Cannes premiere of the shockumentary Mondo Cane, presumably appalled by how the filmmakers transfigured him and his work into a punchline. Jackson Pollock, meanwhile, hit the bottle again after two years sober (the start of a steep decline that resulted in his own premature death), immediately following the shooting of Hans Namuth’s short Jackson Pollock 51 (1951), tormented by the phony ritual of having to “perform” his drip paintings. More obviously solitary artists have also resisted the intrusion of the camera into the sanctuary of their studio.]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-douglas-gordon-by-douglas-gordon https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-shitpostmodernism
— This essay was originally published in our Winter 2025/26 issue, “Salad Days” — The other day in lower Manhattan, I overheard a gaggle of teenagers riffing as they ate an afterschool snack. “Bro, I’m fucking gooning on these dumplings,” one kid cried in between forkfuls, clearly famished in his anime tee and Jansport backpack. At another point, they started arguing about whether streamer Hasan Piker had zapped his dog, and then if mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was still able to “mog the libs” despite letting himself be “edged and cucked” in a White House meeting with Trump. Later that evening, I passed by Sour Mouse, a repellent bar and game hall the color of neon vomit, as it was hosting a “rave” themed after Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014–), a massively popular video game about a nighttime security guard watching a pizzeria chain with creepy animatronics that try to murder you. I walked past four West Village girls loudly complaining that the longtime kosher-style staple Katz’ Delicate]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-shitpostmodernism https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-hbic
Following last month’s column, where I spoke with some enthusiastic users of AI agents, I will confess that I developed some morbid curiosity about letting a little more AI into my day-to-day. I’m generally a critic of techno-solutionism and fearful of the Faustian bargain that is cognitive outsourcing. But “never use AI for anything” doesn’t strike me as a durable long-term position – though “AI” as a catch-all is perhaps unhelpfully broad here. I am categorically opposed to using AI for writing, but not necessarily to Taskmastering the other things that eat up my writing time. Everyone on my feeds is taking gray-market peptides to help them lose weight and lock in or otherwise automating some aspect of their daily slog. I’ll stop short of peptides because I’m scared of needles, but could I still indulge in a little bit of productivitymaxxing, as a treat? I sought out an AI agent platform with the lowest possible barrier to entry, one amenable to an oppositional-defiant little snowfla]]> Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-hbic https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-why-contemporary-art-cant-last
There’s much to recommend “Monuments” at MOCA Geffen in Los Angeles, a show of toppled tributes to the Confederacy – those Southern states that split from the Union in the 19th-century US Civil War to preserve slavery – intermingled with contemporary art. Critics agree it’s refreshing to see a show with real historical gravity and scope, one that frames today’s convulsions toward justice as part of a generational struggle. Statues go up, statues come down. I had high hopes “Monuments” would rise to the political moment, what sometimes feels like the eve of Civil War II. I was disappointed. Walking among all the patinated, graffitied bronze horse butts and angel robes dedicated to bigoted Americans now sequestered in a Frank Gehry-renovated art museum, the ambitious show’s limits felt plain. Contemporary art, by definition, addresses itself to the present moment. But the Confederate monuments dethroned in the recent decade’s anti-racist uprisings and dragged into that context address th]]> Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-why-contemporary-art-cant-last https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-lilli-hollein
Klaus Speidel: You studied design with Paolo Piva at the University of Applied Arts, which shares a building with your museum, before going on to found the Vienna Design Week. How did you originally decide to study design? Lilli Hollein: What really influenced me was an exhibition here at the MAK in 1987, “Bernard Rudofsky: Sparta/Sybaris.” I was wondering at the time what design was and whether I really wanted to do it. For me, this exhibition confirmed that this is a field that offers many different approaches, and that it touches a lot on very different aspects of society and culture. KS: Does transdisciplinarity still play a role for you? LH: Absolutely. As I understand it, design stands as an interface with other undertakings like architecture, psychology, and sociology. It’s a field that people rightly like to turn to when they don’t know where else to go. KS: You’re the general director of Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts. Is design simply the applied art of today, or do you stil]]> Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-lilli-hollein https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-whitney-biennial-2026
Some older digital cameras have a setting called “Kids&Pets.” It’s for quick-moving, joyful moments, where you’ll want flash, a fast shutter speed, and high ISO. Stop those kids and pets in their tracks! Capture the joy! This is the Kids&Pets biennial. Not that it’s superficial and fleeting. The opposite, actually – it wants to slow things down, pause the ruthless cycle of world events, and turn to what matters: family, friends, community. The 2026 Whitney Biennial is a snapshot. In-house curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer have composed a smart, bright biennial. Without a title or a theme, full of abstraction and craft, it’s open to charges of conflict-avoidance. But that’s the point. To the news-addled adult, the kid and the pet have an enviable tunnel vision. What do they know of fascism or genocide? This WiBi presents not causes or doom but fragility, and asks what you’re willing to feed and protect. Is it cringe to care about kids and pets? That’s not a world I want to see. ]]> Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-whitney-biennial-2026 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-richard-turley
Richard Turley sees the world. It’s what all of his work is about: sputters of cognition splashed across a celebrity’s face, a mile of text written by someone with no byline. The goal isn’t a perfect, smooth image, but one rippled with the consciousness of what we say, as much as what we don’t even remember thinking. Turley is technically a graphic designer. His signature text-on-image style is everywhere – in Interview, where he was brought on as Editorial Director to lead the magazine’s redesign in 2018; in his tempestuous and beloved print projects, Civilization and Nuts; in his commercial work for all the brands that run the world (Formula 1, Calvin Klein, Guess) and even in superstars like Rosalía, whom Richard worked with on the visual identity for her latest album, LUX (2025). And like all people with great ideas, you can see Turley’s style in work he didn’t have anything to do with. But beyond titles and disciplines, Turley loves making things. He lives in a forever-creative-fl]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-richard-turley https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-no-ageny
I got hit, in the first few weeks of the new year, with a grotesque flu and an even worse case of techno-optimist derangement syndrome. Living in the beating heart of Silicon Valley makes you vulnerable to a particular kind of myopia: spend enough time around people with professional faith in tech products, and respiratory viruses aren’t the only contagion you’ll risk contracting. I wrote last November that the AI industry looked like an economic bubble – a handful of companies with astronomical valuations despite comparatively small earnings and dubious evidence that their products do much of anything useful. It would take a breakthrough, a serious boost to AI adoption, to turn that situation around. Well, by some accounts, this deus ex machina arrived right on schedule. Deliriously fluish and extremely online, I scrolled through posts gurgling up from the geekiest depths proclaiming that February 2026 was a month of AI revolution. Something called Clawdbot, then Moltbot (to avoid Ant]]> Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-no-ageny https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-moltbook-ai-spectatorship
It’s 28 January 2026 and something weird is happening on Moltbook, a new web forum that appears to have sprung into existence overnight. Within hours of going live, there’s a surge in visitor traffic – more than its servers can handle, before news of the site starts trending on virtually every social-media platform. The first thing you notice about Moltbook is that it looks remarkably like an early version of Reddit, with its dense text and functional Verdana font. Beneath the site banner is a description: “A Social Network for AI Agents. Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote.” And then below, more Verdana, highlighted in green this time: “Humans welcome to observe.” You can almost hear a faint, nerdish cackle. Scroll down, and what you see is a teeming, online terrarium: a social-media platform populated entirely by AI agents that appear, in real-time, to be talking to each other, joking around, upvoting and downvoting, and generally mimicking everything you’d see on a “human” fo]]> Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-moltbook-ai-spectatorship https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-julius-von-bismarck
Christian Egger: I wanted to ask you upfront whether you addressed the specific features of the architecture of the KunstHausWien. Museum Hundertwasser in your current exhibition, or how these site-specific works (like an LED-covered tree simulating flames in a backyard) came about? And perhaps also whether a mid-career consideration played a role in this exhibition, in collaboration with the curator? Julius von Bismarck: Why did I do the exhibition? Firstly, because of the work of curator Sophie Haslinger, especially the environmentally conscious themes present in her previous exhibitions. It was definitely a challenge for me, because the museum spaces here are very crooked and uneven, creating many unique situations where you first have to see if something can even work. On the other hand, Hundertwasser has these strong thematic ties to my work, so, as difficult as it was visually, it was conceptually easy. These two forces balanced each other out a bit, and I thought, okay, let’s ju]]> Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-julius-von-bismarck https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-become-meme-or-die
Clavicular Clavicular Clavicular. Once in a while, a memetic fragment proliferates in the general cyberorganism so intensely that even casual prosumers of social media catch the infection. Such was the week Clavicular, a twenty-year-old mononymous, non-monogamous male beauty influencer and livestreamer, came to New York City. The psychic flak was dense. Clavicular, chatting on the leftist comic Adam Friedland Show podcast; Clavicular, walking the runway for edgelord designer Elena Velez in a white button-down shirt, co-branded by the edgelord NFT collective Remilia Corporation, seemingly stiffened with cum. The feed was saturated. His gravity bent AFK conversations his direction. Somehow, inexorably, the word would be uttered: Clavicular. The art world looked on with awe. Who was this great white beefcake, seemingly unburdened by political awareness, dropping racial slurs and pissing upstream from culture? 90% of the Substacks I follow unpacked him, the New York Times profiled him. At ]]> Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-become-meme-or-die https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-david-claerbout-konschthal-esch
David Claerbout (*1969), the Belgium-born new media artist, is an artist with whom I have always felt a strong kinship, mainly in that both of our practices center the matter of time. I recently traveled to Luxembourg to see “Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years,” a comprehensive exhibition of his work organized by the Konschthal Esch, that allows for a very generous encounter with his oeuvre. The show looks in depth at David’s relationship to the image and to representation-through-images, as well as to questions of vulnerability, absurdity, and duration, thematized and narrated in works that enmesh a highly photographic register within digital constructions of reality. Julieta Aranda: I’ve been trying to look at your exhibition’s gestures, or how the installation is ordered, in terms of time. I don’t mean chronological time, but rather in the sense of how time becomes a material in your work. I want to approach this conversation from that angle, which is already there in the title of ]]> Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-david-claerbout-konschthal-esch https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-richard-hawkins-kunsthalle-wien
“Jesus is still the most erotic male image in painting today,” Marlene Dumas once wrote. I was reminded of the South African-Dutch painter’s aphorism when I visited the large Richard Hawkins (*1961) exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien. For Hawkins’s painterly compositions almost exclusively depict images of male humans: some nudes, other dressed, some of them included for erotic affections, others simply for their physical attributes, whether as porn actor or athlete. I somehow puzzled over the artist’s view about male imaging, asking myself why there is neither Jesus nor a single female portrait in his repertoire, save for one reproduction of the Holy Family and one Tahitian, Gauguin-style woman, the latter of whom appears in a pinboard-type painting, together with some ancient statues and half-naked guitar players. Obviously, Hawkins has his own, non-religious interpretation of male representation, and surely a different idea of masculinity than Dumas. But what might that actually mean? It]]> Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-richard-hawkins-kunsthalle-wien https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-casino-banal
I desperately want to love Las Vegas. I love the Las Vegas that Jean Baudrillard wrote about in the 1980s: a “hologram akin to the world of phantasy,” a “three-dimensional dream … held together by a thread of light”; but that is not the Las Vegas of the present. Nowadays, $10 blackjack tables are nigh-impossible to come by, and the slot machines, backlit screens bedecked by generic cartoon pirates, just feel like giant iPhones. The sports books, spectacular in the strongest sense with their walls of screens – as if Nam June Paik designed a streamer cave – are full of people looking at their phones, because that is where the real gambling happens. Casinos are some of the only establishments in the US where you can still smoke inside, which tells you something about their relationship to vice. There, you can hold a cigarette in one hand and your iPhone in the other, unclear which is doing more harm. Driving through Sin City in his road-trip memoir, America (1986), Baudrillard wrote that ]]> Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-casino-banal https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-epstein-files
As I write, the betting app Polymarket, which lets you wager on real-world events ranging from sports scores to snowfall, has the chance of more Epstein Files this month at 9%. The chance of Trump appearing in them is 75%. The US government blew past the December 19 legal deadline for the documents’ full disclosure. Meanwhile, they invaded Venezuela and Minnesota. Reasonable people may wonder what they’re hiding. One day, the last tranche is gonna drop, but calls to “Release the Files” smooth over the bigger question: Will more Epstein Files tell us anything about the era’s most notorious sexual predator and his world-owning pals that we don’t already know? The smart money would be on “no.” Like previous batches, any new documents will be remarkable less for what they show than what they don’t. They’ll be redacted to oblivion. It takes a pre-sloptimist faith to hope for a revelation among these files. Given the swirl of AI-generated shit around every major news story, and the Trumpist ]]> Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-epstein-files https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-joe-bradley
Christian Egger: I had the pleasure of attending your recent lecture in the nude-drawing class at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, “die Bildende”), where you gave an overview of your artistic career. You showed images of some earlier works that, while absent from your survey here in Krems, definitely have some affinity to your more recent paintings. Joe Bradley: The show in Krems is focused mostly on the last ten years, but it includes a few earlier works. I can see some of my early impulses coming back, especially in these tall-standing figure paintings, which took me a bit by surprise. CE: You mentioned that there could have been various scenarios for this exhibition. JB: If there were four other shows covering this timeframe, they could be four very different-looking shows. When curator Florian Steininger and I began to think about this, I was partial to the idea of focusing more on recent work, rather than trying to put together a true mid-career]]> Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-joe-bradley https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-bio-pop
It’s a uniquely deflating sensation, slinking out of a car into a forest of paparazzi and visibly disappointing them by being yourself instead of being Kanye West. I arrived in Seoul to face a small army of flashbulbs and a cadre of Ye fans (one in full black Donda face sock), gathered on a curb, awaiting the rapper’s rumored arrival to an otherwise unassuming warehouse in Seongsu, a district known for immersive pop-up retail flagships like the Jellycat Space Experience and Gentle Monster’s HAUS NOWHERE. For two nights last December, this venue housed Bianca Censori’s solo artistic debut, billed as a “performance and exhibition,” titled BIO POP. Censori is often introduced as Ye’s second wife, (in)famous for wearing next to nothing and speaking almost never, at once cryptic and hyper-transparent. Trained as an architect, she ascended the ranks as an architectural designer at Yeezy. Ever holding her cards close to her fabulously well-endowed chest, Censori announced BIO POP in a series ]]> Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-bio-pop https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/tops-and-flops-2025
KAITLIN CHAN Cartoonist and director of Empty Gallery, Hong Kong 👍 “The Darkest Hour at 3am,” Current Plans, Hong Kong Curated by Alberta Leung, this exhibition brought together an eclectic group of international artists to ponder on insomnia. Sometimes I feel contemporary art fatigue, and the funny, salient and strange works in this exhibition —ironically— woke me up from my stupor. The show opens with Tobias Bradford’s Dog lying askew. Part-machine, part-man’s best friend, they mournfully jerk their legs like a cyborg stuck in a bad dream. Ben Grosser’s Stuck in the Scroll surveils whether he is logged into TikTok right now alongside a counter of total hours scrolled away, displayed on glowing monitor on a messy desk. A suite of haunting videos, including Yoojin Lee’s mesmerizing screencast of media pertaining to sleeplessness, is installed in a trio of reclining dental chairs, which is my new favorite way to watch video art. I visited on a day when the performer Viola Ming Heng rea]]> Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/tops-and-flops-2025 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/movies-new-disaster-cinema
The last good year for disaster movies was 2009. It started with KNOW1NG, Alex Proyas’s creepy sci-fi thriller starring Nicolas Cage, which I can still remember watching in a friend’s basement. 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina featured prominently as portents in a child’s prophetic visions of apocalypse, which turn out to be transmissions from an angelic alien race. In the lead-up to humanity’s extinction event (a massive solar storm), only a few innocent souls get spirited away by the ETs. Later that year, gas-station rental kiosks were stuffed with 2012, Roland Emmerich’s cataclysmic blockbuster, which made use of popular superstitions surrounding the ancient Mayan calendar to induce a series of calamities – including a tsunami crashing over the Himalayas – before several mega-arks built through international cooperation manage to ferry a chosen few into post-apocalyptic paradise. A suggestible preteen at the time, I absorbed both these movies with nightmare-inducing earnestness. Was it ju]]> Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/movies-new-disaster-cinema https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/comment-maurizio-cattelan-preis-der-nationalgalerie
Whether or not it is appropriate to award the Preis der Nationalgalerie to Maurizio Cattelan, whether the award would “betray” its historical mandate or lack diversity – clearly, it would – or whether it should reflect progressive ethics in the Berlin art system, I would rather discuss its meaning symbolically and apocalyptically. Maurizio Cattelan is undoubtedly an artist of his time. He first transformed institutional criticism into an intimate affair, and then developed it into a matter for advertising strategies applied to the arts and their contexts. From his “Torno subito” (Be Right Back, 1989) shop-door sign to La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour, 1999), the life-sized sculpture of Pope John Paul II being hit by a meteorite, Cattelan has played with deconstructing conventional perceptions of spaces and, moreover, of symbols – death, childhood, evil, art, the display of our discontent – to the point that the idea became his technique. He has left behind works and curatorial objects that ]]> Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/comment-maurizio-cattelan-preis-der-nationalgalerie https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-assaf-gruber-miraculous-accident
Assaf Gruber’s Miraculous Accident (2025) is a cinematic essay that narrates the love between Nadir, a Moroccan who has been invited to study filmmaking in Łódź as part of the Socialist Bloc’s support for anti-imperialism, and Edyta, his Jewish film-editing teacher. It takes as its backdrop the tumult and tragedy of 1968, when a diplomatic rift between the Bloc states and Israel resulted in the forcible expulsion from Poland of around 15,000 Polish Jews, many of whom had remained in Europe after the Holocaust because of their opposition to Zionism. When Nadir, played by the poet and filmmaker Abdelkader Lagtaâ, is notified of a letter written to him by Edyta from Haifa in 1989, he returns to the Łódź Film School – and brings the story of his love affair into the present tense. Weaving together original footage and extracts of films shot in the 1960s by Lagtaâ and his peers, Gruber’s work observes how the political intervenes upon life’s unlikeliest personal encounters. Joanna Warsza: Y]]> Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-assaf-gruber-miraculous-accident https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-in-defense-of-awkward-idealism
I didn’t expect to like Diane Severin Nguyen’s War Songs. The lens-based artist’s commission for the 11th Performa Biennial, a musical revue of Vietnam-era protest songs fronted by a folkie-coded pop singer, promised to bring her stylish vision of globalized youth culture to the subject of US crimes against humanity. On stage, a cast of a dozen musicians in a mix of denim and streetwear offered new arrangements of Vietnam War-era anthems including a shoegaze Bob Dylan cover and a drill version of a folk song called “Napalm Sticks to Kids” (ca. 1970), plus a jangly rendition of 2009 “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus. A quilt of bleached American flags wobbled behind the stage and a camera swooped in front on a crane. It was an awkward evening of off-key song, corny and earnest unto cringe. Judging from the lobby chatter after the show, people were confused and disappointed. As a performance, a “show,” the musical revue had been uneven, unpracticed, and strangely bitter. What had been th]]> Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-in-defense-of-awkward-idealism https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-theres-still-everything-you-cant-get-back
Two years ago, I received an Austrian passport. Before 2020, multiple citizenship had not been permitted in Austria; now, there was a new law making an exception for descendants of victims of Nazi persecution. Soon after Brexit – my siblings and I were born and raised in the UK – my dad began gathering the necessary documentation for our applications. At the time of the Anschluss, his father’s father, Walter Schwarz, was a wealthy Jewish businessman, manager of the family department store, and owner of an art gallery in Salzburg. He and his wife, Dora, were fervent Zionists; in the early 1930s, she left him and took their three sons to Palestine. Walter stayed behind with his mistress. He was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1938, released in August, and re-arrested while trying to flee to Switzerland. His death in the headquarters of the Munich SS was recorded, though the circumstances have been disputed since, as a suicide by hanging on 1 September 1938. The department store and his ]]> Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-theres-still-everything-you-cant-get-back https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-nick-land-november
Recently, at a Bay Area house party, I met a man who described his vocation as “AI safety research.” I asked him what he thought the probability was that an artificial superintelligence would arise in our lifetime to dominate and/or kill us all. He thought for a moment, then told me: thirty percent. As a naif who has spent the bulk of my life outside the AI-development capital of the United States, that number struck me as comical. But around these parts, if you aren’t concerned about the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), you aren’t paying attention. I got home that night and locked in for my nightly Twitter scroll sesh (“for research,” always “for research”). Splashed across my feed was an image I was sure was AI-generated. Tucker Carlson was holding up a photo of a neon-green diagram, known to me from my Goldsmiths student/raver days, shittily printed on a piece of A4 office paper. In fact, it was a screenshot from a real episode of the conservative commentat]]> Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-nick-land-november https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-in-turin-2025
I can’t quit looking at a burning piano, or maybe it’s a car crash disguised as a burning piano. Black keys lightening to charcoal, the white teeth sagging yellower and yellower, it gnashes at my eyes like Hausu (1977, dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi), the Japanese horror film where, among so many other über-camp fantasies, a grand piano devours a girl whole. The photo even seems to smoke out of its frame, begetting a mass of black thread cat’s cradled together at Turin’s Museum of Oriental Art (Museo d'Arte Orientale, MAO), host of a retrospective by Chiharu Shiota (*1972). Across its palatial galleries, the Japanese artist’s works tangle with a demon, sometimes in offering or in awe, as when a shower of blood or viscera seems to fall over bronze casts of Shiota’s severed limbs (Out of My Body, 2019), or in many embroidered drawings where a little silhouette stands in landscapes like roiling cancers. Other confabulations are less body horror than supernatural koan, like an enormous spiral of a]]> Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-in-turin-2025 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-in-paris-2025
It’s been a week since a spaceship of art aliens descended on Paris to wreak their havoc, straight out of Alex Da Corte’s deflated Kermit the Frog head at Place Vendôme. Think Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996) but slightly more stylish. ART BASEL PARIS. Or, leaving the invasion-drama metaphor to one side, maybe it felt more like the mass of chipped cups, trinkets, and burnt-out Tefal pans Merlin Carpenter hung up at di volta in volta in his show “ART PARIS BASEL.” In any case, I am (still) confused and tired and in need of mousse, like Hélène Fauquet’s shells glued to photos of bubbles at Ulrik (Paris Internationale). I have been sucking images for too long. Not just images, but objects, booths, texts, vibes, glances, gossip. Sucking, beating, and frying them for their sense, here is an attempt at a critical crêpe. Sorry if it’s burnt. It is news to no-one that Strong Men have been terrorizing the globe in micro and increasingly macro ways. If the week of Art Basel Paris taught me anyt]]> Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-in-paris-2025 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/books-tea-hacic-vlahovic-give-me-danger
Daily Horoscope: Aquarius: When they call you too blunt, get sharp. Innovation makes everyone uncomfortable. The Rat went out at dawn when the best garbage hunting went down. While Val slept, he crept out from under the sheets, slid down the bed, and crawled through a crack in the wall which led outside to the fire escape. He leapt from one metal stair to the next as if lifted by theater strings. Once safely on the sidewalk, he followed the smell of sweet garbage to get where he needed to be. Glittering trash pyramids lined the streets of New York City. Watch the black bags and they dance. Hot plastic rat disco. Who says Donna Summer doesn’t blast from the slimy leftovers? Who says broken glass won’t spin like a disco ball? It’s Studio 54 with no guest list, anyone with fur in the game has a shot. Just put up a fight for the right spot. Sure, there was some social order. Neighborhoods shape rodents like residents. Are you private school or juvie? Caviar or crack? Locked parks or broken]]> Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/books-tea-hacic-vlahovic-give-me-danger https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-iphone-modernism
“Phones are a terrible medium for performance art,” my friend said, then technologist Mindy Seu directed everyone to whip theirs out. For the next forty-five minutes, a hundred people sat in the dark, faces glowing, following along on Instagram Stories with the lecture-performance A Sexual History of the Internet. Other than the phones, the piece is a fairly conventional tour of key innovations in how we get off online. Two things I learned: The first JPEG was a pirated Playboy centerfold. And there’s a subgenre of BDSM called data domination, where a sex worker takes remote control of your computer. The smartphone, Seu said, is a teledildonic device, a sex toy, relaying stimulation across time and space. “This will be an exercise in restraint,” the lecture began. “Please do not touch your screen unless told to do so.” That was the idea. In practice, the self-reflexive gimmick quickly became a barrier. This constellation of glowing, jaggedly synchronized devices didn’t transmit satisfa]]> Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-iphone-modernism https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/books-amateurs-joanna-walsh
2024: I’m meeting a group of people for a literary event in a bar in Paris: writers, editors, publishers, critics. Some are professional, others unpaid enthusiasts. I guess you’d call them amateurs, except that isn’t quite the right word. In the arts – in writing, especially – enthusiastic amateurs are the gene pool of successful professionals. Or perhaps petri-dish is a more appropriate metaphor. The event is a panel on the contemporary avant-garde, which is another metaphor. That phallic, military, linear figure of speech from the industrial era doesn’t seem, to me at least, to cut it anymore – and specifically doesn’t describe our situation. What, I ask, in what is more of a comment than a question, could be a more useful spatial metaphor? The founder of the magazine, who has since retired, his writing too “minor” (in the sense of Kafka’s phrase, after which the magazine was named), to please the mainstream, answered: what the mag had done was to connect a series of peripheries. Whe]]> Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/books-amateurs-joanna-walsh https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-womens-history-museum-amant-new-york
“My story is brief. I embroider silk and satin at home or outside,” sings Mimì in the libretto of Giacomo Puccini’s 1830s-set La bohème (1895). “I love all things that have gentle magic, that talk of love, of spring, that talk of dreams and fancies … Do you understand me?” Mimì is the type of woman animated by “Grisette à l’enfer” (Grisette in Hell), a new exhibition from the art collective and experimental fashion label Women’s History Museum: poor, waifish, and at once scorned and romanticized as the forgotten labor of fashion in an ever-shifting French Republic. US, collaborators Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan (both *1990) stuff a room at Amant, an arts foundation in industrial Brooklyn, with the detritus of a luxury commercial wasteland. Styrofoam mannequins wrapped in a gauzy concoction of porcupine quills and sugar cubes; a leopard-printed mannequin fraternizing with taxidermied doves; couture mannequins draped in mother-of-pearl casino chips and bobcat fur: these grisettes,]]> Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-womens-history-museum-amant-new-york https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-on-the-origins-of-the-21st-century-kunstverein-in-hamburg
In his 1990 text Seduction, Jean Baudrillard links pornography to the elimination of obstacles. “In a culture that … makes everything speak, everything babble, everything climax,” the pornographic imagination is a command to realize one’s full potential, to titillate every microfibre, to make sex endlessly legible. No more secrets: The radical obscenity of pornography lies less in its salacious content than in the stripping away of that which keeps desire in motion – friction, unknowability, murkiness. Porn, of course, is also an industry. Even in its most graphic forms, it teaches us as much about distribution chains as it does about desire. Structured into five sections, each with its own curator(s) – for example, Elisa R. Linn’s East German sexual counter-publics, or Charles Teyssou and Pierre-Alexandre Mateos’s melange of artworks as corporeal excess – this exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg poses the imaging of sex as a prism refracting the lead-up to the collapse of actuall]]> Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-on-the-origins-of-the-21st-century-kunstverein-in-hamburg https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/vulgarity-the-vulgar-image
— This text was originally published in print in our Summer 2025 issue, Vulgarity— There is too much beauty in the world. There is too much beauty and there are more beautiful people than there have ever been, and they are generally beautiful in the same way. With trompe l’oeil make-up, fillers, and photo editing, they have given themselves the same face and made same kinds of images of themselves. They are becoming images. They tend toward the same ideal (worked out, contoured, airbrushed, fake) image, they bombard the world with that image relentlessly, every day, and that image continues to infinity. In Soho in London last winter, I had dinner with a beauty editor, a stylist, and a fashion photographer. The photographer, showing us something on her phone, casually observed that her Instagram for you page was full of monsters. That is what she was recommended, videos of monsters. Oh yeah, the very successful beauty editor said, that’s what I have too. They showed me. There are AI-gen]]> Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/vulgarity-the-vulgar-image https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-lynn-hershman-leeson
In her upcoming memoir, Private I (ZE Books, 2025), Lynn Hershman Leeson (*1941) reflects on a life of art-making that relentlessly anticipated the world. From the constructed persona of Roberta Breitmore, who navigated life as a fabricated identity, and Lorna, confined by agoraphobia within her television screen, to the sentient program Agent Ruby and her recent ventures in microplastics – these works mark pressure points, foreshadowing the systems we would later grow into and possibilities still to be found within them. In Private I, Hershman Leeson revisits five decades of boundary-crossing work, tracing how art, technology, and survival have remained inseparable in her life and practice. She describes art as both sustenance and disruption, a means of endurance that renders visible what would otherwise remain hidden. To speak with her is to enter the shifting terrain of authenticity, where the “real” is never fixed, but continually remade. Andy DiLallo: Much of your work was decades]]> Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-lynn-hershman-leeson