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?

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.

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?

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 current internet quite like the meme coin.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The former director of Kunsthalle Zürich on why so many of his colleagues love art, their jobs, and the profession – and yet still want to leave.

The US poet’s two newest books, Wave of Blood and The Rose, find life overflowing from its innumerable wounds.

Body mods by Göksu Kunak, Haus der Kunst’s Shu Lea Cheang retrospective, even a speculative “unconference” at Bayerischer Hof – a visual recap of Munich’s marquee art festival.

The new director of Vienna’s ALBERTINA on building a universal art institution to meet its many publics where they are.

A dinner for Klára Hosnedlová’s CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof served three courses, migration stories, and what one server called “a dystopia you can live in.”

The Yugoslavian-born sculptor doesn’t make her otherworldly beings so much as let them onto this perceptual plane.

The artist muses on the authenticity of instinct and what to do with works that are strong enough to fight back.

A son of the diaspora went looking for an education in modern Chinese art – and found both a buzzing market and a new feeling of being made whole.