https://spikeartmagazine.com Articles from Spike Art Magazine en Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:15:52 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/images/favicons/favicon-32x32.png https://spikeartmagazine.com https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-cologne-2026
The train is late. “I like the vibe of Cologne,” are the first words artist Ser Serpas says to me. I decide to follow her. I’m here, with Kévin Blinderman and Charles Teyssou, to install “The Leatherman” at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Our protagonist, Hans Eppendorfer, is a murderer, hustler, and writer who became a book, then a play, then almost disappeared. The ethnographer Hubert Fichte interviewed him; Peter Chatel played him; Karl Lagerfeld dressed him for the stage in leather. Almost nothing survives except the costume. We bought it. It’s too late to install. Tomorrow. At LC Queisser, Tolia Astakhishvili is having what feels like her first properly commercial show, which is to say, there are paintings. For once, the psycho-architecture that usually holds her work together has receded, though two small models remain, like residues of an old spatial obsession. The paintings are washed-out, almost anemic: volcanoes, masks, circles, bodies folding into one another through watery stai]]> Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/7pm-cologne-2026 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/image-gallery-glanzstuecke-van-cleef-arpels-mak-vienna
The exhibition “GLANZSTÜCKE: Van Cleef & Arpels High Jewelry × Masterpieces from the MAK Collection” creates a dialogue between unique and rarely shown objects from every part of the MAK Collection with jewelry art from the 120-year history of High Jewelry Maison Van Cleef & Arpels. The project is the result of an intensive collaboration and inspiring discourse between the two institutions that are united by their shared enthusiasm for outstanding designs, exceptional craftsmanship, and visionary ideas. Some 500 objects spread across six chapters illustrate the principle of excellence that guided this unique exhibition cooperation. Born from the marriage of Alfred Van Cleef and Esther (known as Estelle) Arpels, Van Cleef & Arpels was founded on Paris’s Place Vendôme in 1906. The MAK was established in 1863. As the world’s second-oldest museum of applied art, it runs the gamut from design, architecture, and fashion to contemporary art and stands for a productive connection between the p]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/image-gallery-glanzstuecke-van-cleef-arpels-mak-vienna https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/going-out-in-berlin
Hans: Frühstück3000 (don’t mix it up with our fav gay bar, Ficken3000) serves “Berlin’s better breakfast”: seasonal, high-end plates (vegan muesli, sea-buckthorn French toast, roast beef focaccia with truffle cream) with regional ingredients and amazing coffee. The walls, featuring Navot Miller and a fully tiled kitchen and bar by artist Eric Winkler, turn the space into a living showroom. Miller’s contrasting, collaged scenes add quiet drama; Winkler’s performative, textiley work brings subcultural edge. Casual, professional service; breakfast, any time of day. Rafael: When it comes to breakfast, art isn’t what tips it for me – substance is. And when substance happens to sit five minutes from the Auguststraße gallery mile, that’s the jackpot. The Sanctuary is an entirely vegan bakery reviving Italian pastry classics (but not only), and I mean the serious stuff: focacce, pizzette, cannoli, I could keep going. If you need boost for your Mitte tour, maybe with your taste buds in ecstasy,]]> Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/going-out-in-berlin https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-helter-skelter-fondazione-prada-venice
The first thing one might see upon stepping off the train at Venezia Santa Lucia is a poster for “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince” at Fondazione Prada, its images cropped to fit the poster’s proportions. Anyone familiar with the artists’ use of appropriation can appreciate the irony – even the appropriateness – of encountering their work already reframed by the demands of reproduction. It is a fitting prologue, in that, to an exhibition of stolen, cropped, perforated, repainted and projected images, alongside a few sculptures – assembled from tires, car parts, and aluminum cutouts – that extend the same logic into three dimensions. Curator Nancy Spector brings Jafa (*1960) and Prince (*1949) together for the first time around this shared method and a shared symbolic territory: the vast American imaginary. Yet, they diverge over what lies at its heart, whether a pulse or an abyss, as well as over what to do with it. “Helter Skelter” stages an American vernacular of projec]]> Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-helter-skelter-fondazione-prada-venice https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/on-our-radar-berlin-art-week-2026
Between Bridges “Rachel Seidu: Love is the work” 10 Sep – 25 Oct 2026
 Opening: Friday, 11 Sep 2026, 6–10pm “Combining conceptual and documentary approaches, Rachel Seidu (*1997) makes poetic yet politically charged images that foreground companionship, vulnerability, and resilience. Her work seeks to build a visual archive of queer existence in Nigeria while confronting the violence of exclusion, including conversion therapy and the role of religious institutions in sustaining cultures of intolerance.” Galerie Buchholz “Alix Cléo Roubaud: Si quelque chose noir” 11 Sep – 31 Oct 2026 Opening: Thursday, 10 Sep, 6–10pm “A photographer and writer, Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952–1983) developed a practice of photography that was at once experimental and radical. Having studied the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she sought to push the medium of photography to its limits. Working primarily in a bathroom darkroom in her apartment at 64 Rue Vieille-du-Temple in Paris, Roubaud developed experime]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/on-our-radar-berlin-art-week-2026 https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-shin-hanagata-chimeria
I pop on the goggles and everything gets fuzzy and fish-eyed. The first few movements are haphazard and scared as my right knee, my new eye, lunges forward. Everything feels discombobulated; there’s vision, but it’s the wrong vision. I can hear Shin Hanagata (*1995), the madcap architect of the device I’m wearing, scurrying to move a laptop and iced coffee so I don’t tumble over them. I nearly crash into the wall. “Please put your head on the ground,” he instructs, so I dip my head backward as if I’m laying in a hair salon bowl. With every tentative crawl, I start to slip into my new form; my arms become hind legs, my crotch and torso become the neck, my head becomes a useless trinket dangling in the back like a tail. My knee-eye gazes upward and I see a massive, pulsating anus. We’re at the TAV Gallery in Tokyo, where Shin’s exhibition, “Mitai: Retroactive Media Theory,” has just opened. It’s about body parts. Surrounding me on all sides are all the sides and insides of the artist him]]> Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-shin-hanagata-chimeria https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-art-world-needs-better-fights
Have you ever heard a body hit the padded steel and wood planks of a wrestling ring? It’s jarring, in person – slappy, clattering, a symphony of falling meat. One mosquito-bitten night in August, I journeyed to the postindustrial art space Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for an indie wrestling showcase called PRODUCE: Volume 3. Looking down on the squared circle from the mezzanine, what struck me was the blood. Splatter dried and rinsed to the color of chocolate stains decorated the PRODUCE logo on the canvas. The WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment league) can afford the dry cleaning, I guess, but at this level the dramatic gouts of suffering stay right there in the fabric. A gallery isn’t an obvious venue for wrestling, except that the organizer of the PRODUCE series, businessman Adam Abdalla, is better known in our field as the head of Cultural Counsel, a ubiquitous force in the world of contemporary art PR. It’s hard to overstate their influence. Founded in 2015, CC represents ]]> Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-art-world-needs-better-fights https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/comment-volksbad-volksbuehne-berlin
The performative element, says Matthias Lilienthal, the Volksbühne’s artistic director, over lunch, is naturally the body – partly naked. It is a Tuesday in early August; a few days earlier, the Berlin theater had opened its season with “Volksbad,” and the media coverage has not stopped since. I, too, was meant to go swimming today, to file a ethological piece on this first production under the new leadership. But the showers are broken and, for reasons of hygiene, the pool remains closed for now. On Friday, there will be an unhappy incident: a day reserved for Black children and teenagers will be cancelled, after a right-wing social media campaign stirs up threats of racist violence. But none of us knows that yet. After a plate of pasta, Lilienthal and I walk over to the Volksbad anyway, past security, who are gently turning away a bunch of curious spectators. Shoes off, up onto the rim of the raised pool: a simple, vinyl-lined swimming basin like those used at festivals, rented for t]]> Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/comment-volksbad-volksbuehne-berlin 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, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-quiet-venice https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-goodbye-sadness-hello-sadness-pace-gallery-berlin
Friedrich Kunath’s (*1974) Bar Va Bene (2026) fills the entirety of the first-floor space at Die Tankstelle, the fairly newish Berlin home of Pace, the global blue-chip gallery, now making the utmost of a former filling station. An actual bar and an actual art piece that aims to recreate a watering hole from German artist’s Los Angeles studio, both floors and walls are carpeted in a deep, seductive plush. Football memorabilia, records, notes, and risqué souvenirs clutter the shelves among the bottles and glasses, its sticky counter bookended by a pair of neons that, in sotted dialogue, flicker out the exhibition’s title: Goodbye Sadness, Hello Sadness (2026). It’s a mess, but a hot one at that: a hazy impression of mildly transgressive, mildly jejune, holiday-on-the-Med-style romance that I’d pay cold, hard cash to dream of. Half-taking its name, or more accurately, its vibe, from Françoise Sagan’s moody, sexy, Riviera escapade Bonjour Tristesse, the show aims to share in the 1954 nove]]> Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-goodbye-sadness-hello-sadness-pace-gallery-berlin https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/book-for-late-summer-nights-2026
Justin Torres, We the Animals, 2011 (Granta Books, 2012) Three brothers (seven, eight, and nine), smash tomatoes with a mallet. Raincoats on, they cover themselves, the kitchen, and their mother in pulp. Instead of punishing them, she joins. Paps makes them dance: “Now shake it like you’re rich.” “Poor, now.” Then white, then Puerto Rican. They eat long-forgotten marmalade from the back of the refrigerator when Ma stops going to work, stops cooking for them. Paps forces Ma and the youngest boy into deep lake water one time; they can’t swim. We the Animals is the story of mother, father, little brother, brother, brother. The plot, semi-autobiographical, and the writing are bestial in the noblest sense – raw, eerie, ferocious, tender. Torres, impressively, finds language for what is scary to name, namely the brutal, loving, euphoric, estranging frenzy of family. Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, 2007 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Eighteen, bourgeois, and mortified wit]]> Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/book-for-late-summer-nights-2026 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.”]]> Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/news-spike-spirituality-out-now https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-how-to-win-the-war-on-men
I staggered out of the multiplex into the light of the Staten Island Mall, across a Lidl parking lot, to a godforsaken bus stop surrounded by shopping carts. I had just spent three hours in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, like millions of others, but I was thinking about a different epic: Jackass: Best and Last. Today in New York, it’s a trial to find a screening of either film – Jackass because not many theaters are still carrying it, The Odyssey because the vast seat maps on the movie ticket seller Fandango.com are full, marked with little crested helmet icons. Thence, my journey to the heart of New York’s fifth borough, Staten Island, by train, ferry, bus, and foot, on a quest for a seat at a distance from an IMAX screen that wouldn’t aggravate my scoliosis. The Odyssey, you’ll remember, follows the titular ruler of Ithaca on his long, dangerous journey home from the Trojan War. Odysseus leaves Troy with three ships full of soldiers, and washes up ten years later completely alone, ]]> Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-how-to-win-the-war-on-men https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-carlos-motta-ok-linz
In “Pleas of Resistance,” on view at OK – Center for Contemporary Art, Linz and originally organized by Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a significant gap between artist Carlos Motta’s (*1978) intended effects and his underlying concepts becomes apparent already in the very first work. In We the Enemy, artist Despina Zacharopoulou delivers a deadpan reading of a 2019 manifesto coauthored by Motta, fellow artist Atabey (f.k.a. Carlos Maria Romero), and critic John Arthur Peetz under the collective byline SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together!). She lists dozens of English-language epithets, invectives, and slurs for all manner of queer people, from the quaint to the dehumanizing: “the nancies and the fannies”; “the popper-sniffing fist-fuckers”; “the diseased and the destructive.” But, in light of the fact that many of these terms have been playfully reclaimed by just those communities they were meant to slur, the video posits a notion of the “enemy” that is brittly out of]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-carlos-motta-ok-linz https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-zurich-best-exhibitions-summer-2026
Henrik Olesen “Copies of real-life objects, tools and food” Kunsthalle Zurich 12 Jun – 6 Sep 2026 The Kunsthalle Zurich is a cavernous and clinical site that occupies two massive gallery spaces in the city’s former brewery. It is a nearly impossible task for its curator – and, inevitably, any artist – to find the balance within a solo exhibition between the two separate floors. Henrik Olesen (*1967), though, has managed to do it, and seamlessly so, by dividing them conceptually and completely. Rather than a banal take on molds, casts, or replicas, “Copies of real-life objects, tools and food” operates under a deceptively simple structure of offerings and denials. Downstairs and up, the two installations reorient the viewer within a subversive, highly contemporary critique of consumerism and interiority. The first gallery presents a bemusing assortment of colorful, seemingly sporadic things: eggs, apples, paintbrushes, a computer keyboard a crocodile, and so on, artfully arranged on whi]]> Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/review-zurich-best-exhibitions-summer-2026 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/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/libra-season-institutional-critique-is-tired
They say art has lost its way; that there’s a raw need for new stories to impel us from an aesthetic and political rut. But Contemporary Art does have a direction. The story Contemporary Art tells itself is this: art is all about capital. Financial, cultural, sexual, but capital – ruled by capitalism. In the past few years, artists around the Western world have taken this mindset to extremes. They’re not trying to sell intangible ideas or even NFTs. They’re simply asking to be paid. One headline-bait example landed in 2021, when Danish artist Jens Haaning (*1965) secured a commission from the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, for an exhibition about artists in the workforce. He was given $83,000 [half a million Danish kroner, representing the average annual salary in Denmark and Austria back then] with the understanding that the piece would include that much in framed banknotes. Instead, when they popped open the crates, the frames were empty. As the artist explained, “]]> Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-institutional-critique-is-tired 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/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/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