https://spikeartmagazine.com Articles from Spike Art Magazine en Wed, 20 May 2026 08:46:38 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/images/favicons/favicon-32x32.png https://spikeartmagazine.com 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/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 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/conversation-eugene-kotlyarenko-peter-vack
An unwritten rule of LA life is to do anything to avoid crossing town. So it was strange to find myself commuting to Beverly Hills to catch multiple screenings at the charmingly shabby Lumiere Cinema. Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code (2024) is a pandemic mockumentary about surveillance and performativity wrapped in a screwball comedy while Peter Vack’s www.rachelormont.com (2024) is a vaudevillian, nightmarish tragicomedy about the chronically online. Both films premiered in LA last summer, both circle overlapping themes, and both feature actor Dasha Nekrasova – yes, of the Dimes Sqaure podcast Red Scare – as an updated femme fatale for the e-girl generation. Vack also stars opposite Nekrasova in The Code. Naturally, watching the films, I couldn’t help but think of them as something like mischievous evil twins, each visually and formally inventive in unique ways, but sharing a DNA similarly obsessed with capturing what it means to be a person in a world addicted to being online. I caught ]]> Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/conversation-eugene-kotlyarenko-peter-vack https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-sm-van-der-linden-exile
If you spend enough time on the internet, you’ll eventually come across them: a terminally online, alt-right clique of embittered misanthropes, communicating through a shared vernacular of memes, GIFs, sneering sarcasm, and impenetrable in-jokes. When confronted with a solid argument, they retreat into solipsism, defiantly convinced of their unique, unmediated perspicacity. For they’ve already taken the red pill, the twist of fate that allows the hero of The Matrix (1999) to see the reality beneath simulated society. (Never mind that the Wachowski sisters have spoken of their film as an allegory for their own gender transitions.) Borrowing its title from the third installment in the series (Revolutions, 2003), and curated by fellow artist and critic Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, SM van der Linden’s (*1952) exhibition at EXILE, nevertheless presents a very different internet: one that is an entry point to an emancipatory, feminist, and queer culture. After all, van der Linden herself was ]]> Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-sm-van-der-linden-exile https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-isabel-lewis-tqw
Expanding her practice as a dancer and choreographer, Isabel Lewis’s (*1981, Santo Domingo) artistry dissolves lines between artwork and experience. At Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Zürich, Gropius Bau, and beyond, she has composed environments in which she positions herself as host of various assembling bodies, conceiving performance as a practice of hospitality; a way of being, thinking, and transforming together. Recently, she was appointed artistic co-director, alongside the Austrian dance and performance workshop curator Rio Rutzinger, of Tanzquartier Wien (TQW; Dance Quarter Vienna), one of Europe’s leading centers for contemporary choreography since its founding in 2001. While extending TQW’s legacy of supporting the local Viennese scene and engaging international practices, especially as a hub for experimentation, research, exchange, and presentation, Lewis also intends to reimagine its possibilities. Attuned to both the aesthetic and the social dimensions of performance, her approac]]> Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-isabel-lewis-tqw https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-one-battle-after-another-2025
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025) arrived in theaters the day after the death of militant revolutionary Assata Shakur. Born JoAnne Byron in 1947, by the early 1970s, Shakur had gone from leading the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party to joining the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group. With her comrades, she robbed banks, bombed police cars, and was described by a deputy commissioner of the NYPD as “the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.” She was arrested in 1973, after a routine traffic stop turned into a shootout that left an officer dead; despite demonstrating her innocence, Shakur was sentenced to life in prison for murder. She gave birth to a daughter in pre-trial detention. In 1979, she escaped to Cuba with the BLA’s help, where she spent the rest of her days free from the oppression of the United States. Shakur was the closest thing America had to a Perfidia Beve]]> Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-one-battle-after-another-2025 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-look-but-dont-touch
The invitation said that Russian-born, New York-based artist Vladislav Markov had built a replica strip club, and that there would be performers. Visitors would watch these performers through one-way mirrors, seeing but not seen. Also, the performers would be amputees. What a grim exercise in exploitation, I thought. It might be so fucked that it’s good. Plus, curator Nicolas Bourriaud, of relational aesthetics fame, had written a fawning exhibition text (Management, New York). Maybe I’d learn a bit about technology and voyeurism and the death of intimacy by screen. Reader, these noble hopes were dashed. At the opening, I saw but one woman: the gallerist’s wife. The performers were men. And not male dancers, either, but two stocky bouncer types, dressed as if for winter. Were the girls in the wings? No, there were no girls. But the realism was impressive. Not just in the sense of the textures of the mise en scène – two poles and stages, empties and cigarette butts and rubles strewn aro]]> Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-look-but-dont-touch https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-wolfgang-tillmans-centre-pompidou
The fluffy verbiage of the press release for this show – stressing its “unique” character – does little to prepare its readers for its grandiose actuality. A “curatorial experiment” less on the part of Wolfgang Tillmans (*1968) than of the museum itself, this presentation allowed the artist “free rein” over what is, in fact, a full-blown institutional retrospective, no less than a site-specific intervention into six thousand square meters of the Centre Pompidou’s Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI; Public Information Library), now defunct and awaiting, like the rest of the museum, a massive, five-year renovation. Almost entirely vacated, the library’s infrastructure has not only been exposed, but aestheticized, a site of knowledge production now become a kind of romantic ruin. Its leftovers have been woven into a complex scenography by architect Jasmin Oezcebi, whose exhibition design merges existing hardware – furniture-marked grey and purple carpets, old signage, workstations r]]> Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-wolfgang-tillmans-centre-pompidou https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-everyone-is-expensive
When I’m not spending my eight-block journeys to the subway letting scream-heavy post-punk keep me from lying down in despair, I spend them compulsively adding up the retail value of every piece of clothing and jewelry I’m wearing. If the grand total is greater than a month’s rent, I feel luxurious, even when the wind makes my bones chatter. My shamble turns to a stride. I don’t need anyone around me to know how much my outfit cost, but a sense of security comes with knowing how much I could shell out for the clothes I adore. Ever since I obliterated my savings account to buy a ring with the excuse that some people my age are having children or snorting coke so I should be allowed my own stupid decisions, all it takes is a nice pair of jeans or my ROC boots to make a rent-money outfit. The algorithmically fucked dregs of TikTok that is Instagram Reels has recently coughed up some advice for me: dozens of videos, almost entirely from young women, telling me “How to look expensive on a b]]> Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-everyone-is-expensive https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-13th-berlin-biennale
There is a point, as you visit the 13th Berlin Biennale, after which your mind stops perceiving the art and begins to wonder what went wrong. I can’t go on, I’ll go on, I muttered to myself at the former Moabit courthouse on Lehrter Straße. I was dragging my feet past well-meaning but mostly unmemorable art nullified by brusque hangs and minimal contextualization. A curator’s job is to select, edit, and decide what deserves to be seen: to identify, to platform, and to give space. Yet here, where there might otherwise be breathing room, there is only a kind of exasperated sadness. I don’t want to add my voice to those legions who want to hasten the death of international mega-shows. In theory, there is nothing wrong with this exhibition’s guiding concept of the “fugitive.” I informally asked some peers of mine. What did they think of this year’s Berlin Biennale? None of them had seen it. When the flagship exhibition of the German capital failed to interest the artists, researchers, and ]]> Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-13th-berlin-biennale https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-shrinkbots-part-1
August: notoriously, the month when therapists, much like the art world, take off for summer vacation. They set their out-of-office autoresponders and decamp for the woods or something, leaving us to marinate in our mental instability, if only for a month. Fair enough. But what if one craves a therapist that’s never on vacation? Fear not: The New York Post reported, in May, of a deus ex machina. “ChatGPT is my therapist – it’s more qualified than any human could be,” a millennial digital nomad proclaims in the tabloid’s headline. Some people outsource their entire university education to robot helpers; others harbor lovey-dovey feelings for their AI girlfriends. Why not shrinkbots? Tuesday, 26 August marked one thousand days since the launch of ChatGPT. In that time, using AI for “free therapy” has become a phenomenon, fueled by influencer marketing couched in vague wellness jargon. TikTok is replete with tips on how to use ChatGPT to turbocharge your trauma-healing: One video instruct]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-shrinkbots-part-1 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/artist-talk-mark-leckey-bill-kouligas
Bill Kouligas: It’s good to see you. It’s been a long time. BK: I’m good, I’m good. I’m in Berlin. I’ve been traveling quite a bit the past month, but I got back yesterday. So, I’ll be back home for a minute, which is great. BK: I was in Milan for two weeks. I did a big presentation during the Salone del Mobile, of a collaboration between [my record label] PAN and Nike. I designed a shoe for them, and with that excuse, built a whole world around it, which was more where my interest was. I mean, I love design and its principles and its history and all that stuff, and it was an interesting process to work on a sneaker, using the same creative research and methodology that I would use for an art book or a DJ setting or a sound piece. But within that process, I built a whole environment, which was then presented at Dover Street Market in Tokyo, then at events in Athens, London, Venice, and so on. BK: No. They wrote me because they were interested in working with a contemporary electronic m]]> Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/artist-talk-mark-leckey-bill-kouligas https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-zoe-dubno-happiness-and-love
Last year, on a press trip to review an exhibition at the contemporary wing of a major museum in a European capital city, I met my first billionaire. Heiress to one of the continent’s largest private family art collections, she took me for a coffee in the museum which bears her family name. She looked vaguely in my direction while asking polite questions, without listening to the answers. Very graceful behavior, I thought, to even pretend to be interested in me – presumably because, in exchange for this attention, she thought I’d write a nice review of “her” show. I also very briefly met an extremely famous curator. I was in the European capital city at the same time as a poet I know, who was there to collaborate on a show with him. At a party in an unbelievably expensive apartment, I asked the poet about this curator. “He collects names,” she told me. “He’s like a little boy with a stamp collection. He just wants to know who’s interesting, and he’s delighted when you can tell him abou]]> Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-zoe-dubno-happiness-and-love https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/after-the-song-of-the-summer
In 2014, author Saul Austerlitz wrote a screedy New York Times op-ed against a strain of music writing that gets genuinely excited about glossy radio hits: poptimism. Critics in ivory towers, he argued, believe they’re oh so radical for placing Taylor Swift on the same plane as less obviously commercial, more artistically “serious” musicians. The irony is that so much of the world adores Swift – so how subversive can it be to expound upon the luminously lush leitmotifs in “Blank Space” (2014)? More than a decade later, other forums for cultural criticism have tightly embraced mass culture, and the art responds in turn. It’s creativity as violent capitalist samsara, where everything enters into and is expelled by the body of market forces. If Pop used to be specific to individual artists (or at least distinct scenes) whose creativity radiated outward to a wide audience, today, no art, music, or fashion exists separately from an existing web of content that surrounds it. Every pop song i]]> Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/after-the-song-of-the-summer https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-hello-cruel-world
Caenorhabditis elegans, the miniscule worm called the nematode, has exactly 302 brain cells. That’s big enough to be interesting, but small enough to chart its every interconnection. In fact, with modest computing power, one can emulate the creature’s brain – a godly experiment performed in 2025 by artist Harris Rosenblum. His work, programmed by Karyn Nakamura and titled Infinite Pain, simulates a nematode brain on a gaming PC. Every few minutes, supposedly, the nematode receives the signal for pain. The piece presents as a moral quandary. It’s a virtual brain, so – is it virtual pain? And if so, does that count as actual cruelty? Never mind that some people doubt that “lower animals,” virtual or otherwise, can feel pain at all. The piece conveys a negative aura simply in that the artists decided to build a torture chamber. Why not a nematode orgasmatron? Because the question of morality vis-à-vis a digital worm is less interesting than the flagrant gesture of cruelty (or its appearan]]> Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-hello-cruel-world https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-how-i-spent-my-summer-vacation
A cardboard cutout of a black bear greets me at the airport in Aspen, Colorado, faintly illuminated by the glow of LED screens running luxury fashion ads throughout baggage claim. “Be Bear Aware!” – even in the ritziest of resort towns, danger may lurk around every corner. I’ve made the glissade across the Rocky Mountains for the first edition of AIR, a weeklong festival dedicated to “radical imagination, art, and exchange” at the Aspen Art Museum (AAM). The directive seems to be: Davos for the Serpentine set. The program features performances, installations, and talks that bleed between disciplines, “designed to explore the role of art in addressing the questions and complexities of our time” by bringing artists, architects, theorists, and technologists together in the brisk mountain air. A twenty- million-dollar, ten-year venture, it is free and open to the public. “It’s like Silicon Valley meets Santa Fe but make it Switzerland,” a writer from New York observes, wide-eyed, and then ]]> Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/user-error-how-i-spent-my-summer-vacation