Billboard: SPIKE #84 – VULGARITY – IS OUT NOW!
Spike Print Subscription
Four glossy quarterlies delivered straight to your door
From €78
Seth Price »Zero Bow Mask«, 2021
Edition of 30 + 5 AP
€1000
Gina Beavers, “In-N-Out Burger,” 2020
Edition of 30 + 5 AP
800
Josh Smith, »Welcome to America«, 2024
Edition of 30 + 5 AP
€1000
An image for the showcase module titled, "SPIKE #84 – VULGARITY – IS OUT NOW!"
SPIKE #84 – VULGARITY – IS OUT NOW!

Featuring a theory of The Vulgar Image, sex-goddess tutorials, dick paintings, cocaine buffets, steal-wealth obscenities, rehumanization outside the law, hijacked vernaculars, Black entertainment paradoxes, institutional musclemen, the Cinema of Transgression, vulgar fashion, a history of kakistocracy, NASCAR’s prayers, Benneton ads, cutting-edge shitcoins, Las Vegas, and the difference between being a hot girl and wanting to fuck one.

How to Defile the Venice Biennale
By Travis Diehl

A far-right troll wants to hijack the US Pavilion. These days, might such a stunt be the most honest form of art?

Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Swirly Syntax
By Cara Schacter

In the New York author’s new novel, the media-core melodrama Little Pink Book, abuse of language comes as a so very sweet surprise.

Lygia Clark at Neue Nationalgalerie
By Ela Bittencourt

In Berlin, a highly interactive retrospective makes palpable the late Brazilian artist’s turn to touch as the occasion for psychic awakening.

Hito Steyerl: “Who Prompted All This Shit?”
By Günseli Yalcinkaya

The artist, filmmaker, and author of Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat grapples with magical thinking, implication in military-industrial AI, and machine learning’s many roads not taken.

Optimal Brain Damage
By Paul Feigelfeld

A lecture at Vienna Digital Cultures cuts through the semantic fog of AI “optimization” to uncover technofascism’s growing monopoly on power.

Big Showgirl Energy
By Susan Finlay

On femininity and fame in Philippa Snow’s new essay collection, It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me.

Mikołaj Sobczak at Salzburger Kunstverein
By Annalise June Kamegawa

Can history painting survive 2025? In Sobczak’s hallucinatory canvases, it glitches into view, caught between the mythic and the meme.

Sycophancy
By Alex Quicho

Drawing on feminized aesthetics and LLM performativity, a lecture at Vienna Digital Cultures scours user interactions with AI for our collective desires – among them, a little too much charm.

7pm in Vienna
By Aodhan Madden

GHB clocks, newly drawn brains, stoned computers – a three-day tour of the annual festival Independent Space Index uncovered the city’s offspace unconscious.

:::Feel The Future:::
By Lil Internet

A lecture at Vienna Digital Cultures eulogizes a fading era of the internet, drawing on pre-millennial cyberspace, a post-millennial return of cyber occultism, and the Golem of Prague.

The Vulgar Image
By Dean Kissick

AI is co-spawning a visual culture beyond any imagination. Will an overthrow of good taste re-vest pictures with their mysterious power? Or are we chasing our machines into pastiche hell?

False Fronts: An Interview with R.I.P. Germain
By Hannah Black

Maker of stash houses and squad-car coffins, R.I.P. Germain’s key is an icy disquiet. His aim isn’t to glorify crime, though, so much as to re-humanize those the law is drawn to exclude.

Ads Don’t Lie
By Isabella Zamboni

Once was a sweater empire built from pictures of pain. As catchy as they were outrageous, the “United Colors of Benetton” induced an era-defining confusion: Where does the ad end and the world begin?

Now I Gotta Giga Ape
By Jared Madere

Are you above getting rich by eating gas-soaked pizza? Sure, the attention economy is bringing out the dumbest in people; but no picture distills the feeling of being online these days quite like the ...

The Delicious Highs of “Writing on Raving”
By Nick Daoust

A new collection of New York club dispatches alchemizes the dancefloor’s utopian politics, animal debauchery, and many ghostly pasts.

Food Is Sex: Spiral Theory Test Kitchen
By Whitney Mallett

Precious Okoyomon, quori theodor, and Bobbi Salvör Menuez’s food art is sliming the psychic space between the body’s holes – and might just “turn” you trans. Republished from Spike #83 – Food.

The 6th VH AWARD at HEK
By Spike

Ahead of Art Basel 2025, Chinese artist Wendi Yan received the Hyundai Motor Group’s Grand Prix for a new film re-imagining the history of East-West epistemic encounter.

19th Venice International Architecture Exhibition
By Andrew Pasquier

If Carlo Ratti’s design showcase is bloated, messy, and somewhat too disinterested in aesthetics, its address of climate crisis also abounds with a rare quality for 2025: optimism.

Going Out in Basel
By Oskar Weiss

Headed to art’s big bazaar on the knee of the Rhine? Don’t miss the city’s best croissants, a Friends-themed dive bar, and a dancefloor worth the queue.

Fanny Hauser’s Many Partners in Crime
By Leila Peacock

The incoming director of Kunsthalle Zürich on thinking translationally, pulling out all the stops for artists, and a city coming into its cultural own.

SIGNA’s “The Final Year” at Wiener Festwochen
By Klaus Speidel

In a six-hour performance-installation at Funkhaus, Vienna, over-direction stymies the bleed between make-believe hospice and real-life aging and dying.

Art On Stream: A YouTube Genealogy
By Habib William Kherbek

What did algorithms ever do for visual culture but dumb it down? Artists, it turns, out, have been evolving a new form in the unlikeliest of corners: YouTube.

A Case for Happy Endings in “Sentimental Value”
By Nolan Kelly

In a festival brimming with doom and gloom, a film by Joachim Trier won Cannes’s Grand Prix by offering its characters a choice to mend.

Gala Season
By Travis Diehl

What do you do when the culture wars come for public art by zeroing out your grants? Throw another dinner. This month, Travis Diehl reports from the crisis-y head tables of NYC’s benefit extravaganza.