Twenty years into Spike, what does it mean to do culture Post-Cool? Launching the same year as The Facebook (now an AI auto-spam singularity), Berghain (subject to boycott), and the first EP by Kanye West (need we say more?), how do we retrain the spotlight on art that deals productively with the world?
In our horizonless contemporary, it begins with shaking off crisis-y helplessness and reupping the magazine’s original wager: to be a space that’s generous to art. That also means trying to read the many forms of its Bruegelian Wimmelbild, this all-at-once variety show: choreography or slot machines in white cubes; Taylor Swift’s pop reign; literary fragments in the age of texting and paintings of flowers that never wither.
With Rita Vitorelli, Dean Kissick, Rose Wylie, Amalia Ulman, Martin Herbert, Milo Rau, Alex Mackin Dolan, Benjamin Hirte, Jeppe Ugelvig, Calla Henkel, Martti Kalliala, Adina Glickstein, Travis Diehl, Bibiza, Whitney Mallett, Steven Phillips-Horst, Tea Haċić-Vlahović, and more … PLUS! Best-of-Spike reprints by Chris Kraus, Bruce Hainley, Ella Plevin, Sean Monahan, Gavin Brown & Daniel Baumann
