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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.

Pieter Schoolwerth at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler
By Alicja Schindler

Even as the artist’s hand becomes part of the algorithm, a Berlin exhibition shows that, as a medium, painting still needs the body.

“Never Again Peace”: steirischer herbst 2025
By Eva Scharrer

Cued by a satirical wager between Napoleon and St. Francis of Assisi, the Graz art festival makes a wry case that war’s “before times” are already behind us.

Shrinkbots, Part II
By Adina Glickstein

This month, Adina Glickstein ventures further into the philosophical deep end as she fumbles towards a theory of psychoAInalysis.

Eugene Kotlyarenko & Peter Vack Expose Our Digital Hell
By Sammy Loren

By turns complimentary and combative, two leading lights of “post-internet cinema” talk out art’s responsibility to stay with the times, no matter how strange.

SM van der Linden at EXILE
By Chris Clarke

In Vienna, a former sex worker’s mash-up of broke pop, bad taste, and low-res funk beckons the outsider – and can be extremely slippery.

On Hosting the Live Institution: Isabel Lewis
By Alice Heyward

The new artistic co-director of Tanzquartier Wien envisions dance as a practice of hospitality – with Vienna’s many publics as her guests.

It Is Our Duty to Win: One Battle After Another
By Nolan Kelly

By turns militant, paranoiac, and deeply satirical, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film stages an opposition to US fascism beyond screenshotting tweets.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Centre Pompidou
By Hans-Jürgen Hafner

In Paris, a library overflows with the alt-iconographic displays that made the photographer synonymous with visual culture’s last new normal.

Everyone Is Expensive and No One Is Real
By Erin Evans

What good is cut-rate, lookalike luxury if it can only be worn onscreen?

Unlucky Thirteen
By Pablo Larios

A Berlin Biennale more intent on crisis management than exhibition-making raises the question: Does the biennial format – and Berlin itself – still deliver?

Shrinkbots, Part I

By Adina Glickstein

So — your cousin’s seeing an AI therapist. What could possibly go wrong?

Two Waves Meeting Each Other: Mark Leckey & Bill Kouligas
By Spike Editorial Team

The British artist and the founder of PAN records harmonize on brands and arcana, waste and subculture, and music’s animalistic approach towards the future.

Does Anyone Here Care About Art Anymore?
By Andrew Key

Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, is a one-night pan of the art world’s obsessions with surfaces and being seen.

More than Noise, Almost the City: Berlin Atonal
By Spike Editorial Team

Laurel Halo, okkyung lee, Dimitri Hegemann, Alessandro Cortini, Valentina Magaletti, Shackleton, Ziúr, and Mark Reeder on a festival that has rewired local art, club culture, and avant-garde music.

After the Song of the Summer
By Greta Rainbow

What can Pop possibly mean when the commodity has been overwhelmed by content? A view from dual shows by Laila Shawa and Esben Weile Kjær at the Salzburger Kunstverein.

Hello, Cruel World!
By Travis Diehl

In the age of memetic outrage, can art find the courage to be ambivalent?

David Hockney at Fondation Louis Vuitton
By Pierre-Alexandre Mateos

Ranging from opera sets to iPad screens across hundreds of paintings, a Paris blockbuster edifies the British artist’s ability to make visible – yet never violate – intimacy.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation
By Adina Glickstein

The first edition of AIR, a lush, searching, firework-like festival at the Aspen Art Museum, raised the question: What makes art human?

The Perfect Berlin Meme
By John Holten

“Global refuge.” “Cosmopolitan nowhere.” Under a regime of rent hikes, right-wing politics, and violent censorship, what is becoming of a city whose image long amounted to artistic freedom?

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 soporific fog of “optimization” semantics to uncover AI-thoritarianism’s rising bid for power.