JON RAFMAN, »YOU ARE STANDING IN AN OPEN FIELD (MOUNT ADAMS, WASHINGTON) SPIKE EDITION«, 2019
€ 2.500,–
SETH PRICE »ZERO BOW MASK«, 2021
UNIQUE PRINT & VINYL LP
€1,000.00
GINA BEAVERS, »IN-N-OUT BURGER«, 2020
€ 800,–
SPIKE »THE MUSEUM ISSUE« T-SHIRT
Released on occasion on Spike’s Issue #75 - »The Museum Issue«.
€ 40,–
An image for the showcase module titled, "Spike #80 – The State of the Arts"
Spike #80 – The State of the Arts

A sense of major flux is spreading in the art world – and not only among its pessimists. Under pressure from reactionary politics and its own “now more than ever” imperatives, so much in art is transforming: criticism into a flashy rubber stamp; art schools into trauma industries; fairs into 3D-PDFs; museums into everything for everybody; and art-making into a moral protocol.

Some artists are responding by dropping out, going Web3, or protesting genocide; a few are launching their own galleries or wellness brands; plenty are still just painting painting painting.

This issue is point of reference so that the next time we go off road, we can find a way back to our last clear perspective – a bit jaded, a little dizzy, but faithful as ever that artists are finding our way forward.

With Travis Diehl on riskless art; Domenick Ammirati on getting ahead by getting hot; Anna Kornbluh on culture as pure vibe; an interview with O’Flaherty’s Jamian Juliano-Villani; Aodhan Madden on Maggie Lee, Ser Serpas & K8 Hardy; Jaakko Pallasvuo and Kristian Vistrup Madsen talk dropping out of the art world; a primer on decentralized social media; Elham Dawsari’s postcard from Riyadh; Nicolas Bourriaud on this year’s Venice Biennale; and so much more.

Sigmar Polke’s “Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper-Right Corner Black!”
By Nina Pohl

Opening a witty, poignant show at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, the Kunstverein’s director revisits the work that made Sigmar Polke the chief ironist of German contemporary art.

Lily McMenamy at Cafe Theater Schalotte
By Philipp Hindahl

In her last theatrical work, the proudly histrionic Lily McMenamy scrambles all the idiosyncrasies that make up the performance of the self.

Wayne Koestenbaum Digresses
By Thomas (T.) Lax

The poet, critic, factotum artist, and maker of five new short films texts with a MoMA curator about the slap-slap of montage and coziness as the cousin of the sublime.

Philosophy of Nature 4.0
By Christian Kobald

Thinking Planets, a new book on the discourse of planetarity, coauthored by Armen Avanessian and Daniel Falb: A Q&A and an excerpt.

The Erotic Pity of Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer”
By Nolan Kelly

A French auteur notorious for reenacting patriarchal sex fantasies flips the script post #MeToo by casting an older woman in the role of predator.

On Newness
By Joanna Walsh

Are we feeling nostalgia yet for nostalgia? Autumn’s fashion obsession with novelty may just veil our comfort fix.

Vaginal Davis at Moderna Museet
By james taylor-foster

Across six Stockholm institutions, an exhibition of tongue-in-cheek “terrorist drag” is vast, charmingly megalomaniacal, and spectacularly queer.

Javier Peres Holds a Mirror up to the Times
By Ana Finel Honigman

The founder of Peres Projects weighs in on why artists still love Berlin and cherishing art history’s one-hit wonders.

Going Out In Vienna 2024
By Victoria Dejaco

Is there more to Austria’s capital than hot sausages and chocolate cake? A precocious gallerist passes the menu on where to eat a vegetable during the city’s art festivities.

Jana Euler at WIELS
By Emile Rubino

In Brussels, a party-like retrospective finds the network painter trying to show her medium becoming “painting” in wordplay, hyperbole, and visual gags.

Three-Sided Football at Casa Museo Asger Jorn
By Daniele Panucci

A joint residency by David Adamo, Giacomo Porfiri, and Wolfgang Staehle poetically revivified the home Jorn called “a machine of human and universal expression.”

Contemporary Art’s Twin Follies
By Mike Pepi

Gripped by a crisis of purpose, institutions that once formed culture’s vanguard are redecorating the past in two genres of nostalgia. Is there a way out?

Simone Fattal at Secession
By Max Henry

Cast in clay, collage, and lyrical fragments, a constellation of gracefully raw works in Vienna beckon into the artist’s world of fables.

On Fakes
By Joanna Walsh

What are we looking for in authenticity if faking is our contemporary condition? In a hyperreality without originals, nobody knows your Birkin is a fake.

Katrin Mayer at Badischer Kunstverein
By Lain Ocean

In Karlsruhe, an exhibition of wordplays and unruly language salutes the work of early women programmers and recasts art as the bureaucracy of dreams.

Do You Trust Art Critics?
By Andrew Norman Wilson

In our latest print issue, a recovering artist details the thankless, feckless, and pay-less compromises of writing sense into art.

Laurens von Oswald on Berlin Atonal’s Alchemical Wagers
By Patrick Kurth

The co-director of a Berlin festival for experimental music talks designing mass moments for art in the many possibilities of an audience’s trust.

No Wave Film Icon Beth B on Making Art after Rage
By Rachel Pronger

The misfit-starring, guerrilla director’s show at a former Berlin crematorium explodes with four decades of catharsis.

William Forsythe at MAK
By Lisa Moravec

As part of ImpulsTanz, a Vienna exhibition by the choreographer William Forsythe draw attentions to how the body is reined, in ways seen and unseen.

Miranda July Does It All Herself
By Francesco Tenaglia

A Renaissance woman expounds on awkwardness as a live feeling, the freedoms of art’s nonsense economy, and her exhibition at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan.

Don’t Give Up the Day Job
By Susan Finlay

Recent debut novels by Rachel Cattle, Sinéad Gleeson, and Hannah Regel deal with the realities of women making a living making work.

“The Body Is the Only Object”: Geumhyung Jeong
By Lisa Moravec

Ahead of her return to mumok & ImPulsTanz, Vienna, the Korean dancer and artist unpacks her interest in control.

On Getting There
By Joanna Walsh

People used to wear suits on the plane. Now, everyone wears sweatpants and athleisure. What does this have to say about our permanent sense of displacement?

Eight Very Agitated or Awful Books for Summer
By Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski

Artist Ed Atkins and poet Steven Zultanski recommend eight very agitated or awful books for the summer.