“An Accumulating Tale”" An Artist Talk by Assaf Gruber
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On Tuesday, 18 February at Soho House Berlin, Assaf Gruber will score the ebb and flow of local and global social change in his new Berlinale premiere, Miraculous Accident.

Amy Sillman at Kunstmuseum Bern

With a memory game’s slyness, the painter’s first institutional European survey springs her work free of its pigeonhole between abstraction and figuration.

“Post Human” at Jeffrey Deitch

In Los Angeles, a second take on a watershed exhibition underscores how little has changed aesthetically and conceptually since 1992.

The KAWS Collection at the Drawing Center

In New York, a graffitist synonymous with corporate branding proves a formidable ally of underground, self-taught, and anti-institutional art.

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Mark Leckey, »Taken-Out of the Place-You-Stand«, 2024
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An image for the showcase module titled, "Spike #81/82 – The Post-Cool"
Spike #81/82 – The Post-Cool

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?

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 AND! Our new poster: “A Radically Condensed History of Life Under the Sign of Spike: 2004–24”.

Ann-Sofie Back Burnt It All
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Ann-Sofie Back’s contradictions unsettle many, yet she thrives in them. With a new exhibition in Stockholm, the enfant terrible of Scandinavian fashion is as honest and unnerving as ever.

Uncanny Humanity in Grand Theft Hamlet
By David Kobe

Sure, hijacking helicopters is cool – but can it also be tender? A new documentary shot entirely in GTA V reframes the hard work of being in Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy.

On Catwalks
By Joanna Walsh

Does the fashion show’s linear, modernist form still have a home in the rhizomatic 21st century?

Lurking, Thrashing, Shapeshifting: Tanztage Berlin 2025

By Alice Heyward

Sophiensæle’s festival for emerging dancers met a recent public budget freeze with ass and drag, tentacles and devil horns – that is, in wild style.

On Mechanophilia; or Art’s Love of Cars
By Andrey Shental

From staging sleek self-drivers to junkyard scraps, recent theater, dance, and installation art have troubled a culture of treating machines like people.

Cristine Brache Is a Lucky Star
By Jon Leon

The artist’s new poetry volume, Goodnight Sweet Thing, is an elegy for starlet Dorothy Stratten and an ode to our most democratic artform.

Medardo Rosso at mumok
By Patricia Grzonka

A Vienna retrospective of Rodin’s anarchistic “little brother” sites his tilted figure as a watershed moment in modern sculpture.

Pattern Recognition
By Travis Diehl

Los Angeles is on fire – again. When disasters feel like AI text prompts, what can’t be predicted or replaced?

The Bus Is Leaving Without Us
By Lydia Eliza Trail

A flush, on-foot, rabbit-fur-coated tour around cOnDo LoNdOn 2025, an international gallery mixer where everyone seems like a twenty-something or a millionaire (or both).

Hacking Death
By Adina Glickstein

How does life look that means to live forever? A case study in “longevity maximalist” Bryan Johnson’s shirtless quest to measure himself unto immortality

American Politics Becomes Its Very Own Meme
By Sam Venis

With a new coin in the realm, the men who industrialized attention bow down to their merchant king.

You’re the Canceled Version of Me: Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet
By Anne Imhof

What does music sound like inside out? Three producers muse to Anne Imhof about the subconscious of noise on their new dual album HOAX.

On Regret
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In a culture of eternal returns, how can we channel the buyer’s remorse of the January sales into something more creative?

“PECHE POP: Tracing Dagobert Peche in the 21st Century”
By Spike Editorial Team

For the first time in over a quarter of a century, the MAK, Vienna, is dedicating a major exhibition to Dagobert Peche, visionary and enfant terrible of the Wiener Werkstätte.

Is Accelerationism the Same Thing As Falling in Love?
By Alexander Iadarola

Theorist Amy Ireland and recrypted philosopher Maya B. Kronic footnote their new book on demonic possession, PC Music, and taking back the history of the future.

Old Water from New Pipes
By Travis Diehl

How do you distinguish resolve from resistance to change? Every new year, we tend to cling to our resolutions – but 2025 is high time to learn from their very doubtfulness.

Tops & Flops 2024
By Simon Denny, Daniel Baumann, Biz Sherbert, Jaime Chu, Mindy Seu, Gianni Jetzer, Jeff Poe, Cara Schacter, and Martina Tiefenthaler

In another year eclipsed by right-wing politics and apathetic art, nine Spike trustees separate global culture’s wheat from its chaff.

Bibiza, What Is Vienna?
By Bibiza

Buoyed by the release of his second record, till someone cries, the prince of Austrian rap revels in the contradictions of the city’s dirty glitterati.

On Futility
By Joanna Walsh

In an always-optimized world, can “futility wear” offer the solution to utility itself?




Post-Cool Berlin
By Calla Henkel, Gisela Gapitain, Robert Schulte, Jenny Schlenzka, and Ludwig Engel

Rent hike by rent hike, people are drifting to the city’s fringes, taking its “poor but sexy” promise with them. Five denizens reality-check Berlin’s latest in-between moment.

What Happened to New York?
By Whitney Mallett

Everything’s expensive, it’s hot year-round, and even the art market is dipping – but a sense of being in Eric Adams’s CGI hell together still endures.

I Will Follow You Into the Dark
By Steven Phillips-Horst

Time was, consoles were button-mashing escapes from class or the 9-to-5. But as games increasingly mimic our lived experiences, can our digital avatars offer a way back into the real?

Simone Forti Is Still Red-Cheeked and Full of Energy
By Luca Lo Pinto

From her exhibition at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan, a pathbreaking choreographer of touch thrills to a transition into less embodied forms of poetry.

Angels in America
By Travis Diehl

Following Trump’s slop-fueled, broligarchic triumph, one poll worker asks: How can art get back to turning clout into power?