Spike Event: A Talk by Ben Davis

So where’s art headed? American art critic Ben Davis’s most recent book of essays, Art in the After-Culture – Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (2022), looked over the big forces that have changed the rules of the game in the last decade: new technology, new political movements, and general chaos in the intellectual sphere. For Spike, he’s updating those themes for 2023, amid a radical vibe shift and AI cranking anxieties about creativity under capitalism to ever-weirder highs.

Location: Spike Berlin, Goebenstraße 22, 10783 Berlin
Date: Tue, 4 July – 7pm

RSVP here until 3 July abd join us for a frosty drink and chilly beats on the steamy Schöneberg asphalt.

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BEN DAVIS is an US-American art critic. He is the author of Art in the After-Culture (2022) and 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013) and has been the National Art Critic at Artnet News since 2016. He lives in Brooklyn.

Events
Spike Berlin
Ben Davis
Author Talk
Crisis Aesthetics

Discourse
 Internet meme courtesy of the author

 Internet meme courtesy of the author

User Error: What’s On Your Mind?

When, if ever, is language natural? In her November column, Adina Glickstein contemplates writing unburdened by digital posterity and what freedom might lie beyond consent.

People
Lydo performs at the Knockdown Center, Brooklyn, 2023

Lydo performs at Knockdown Center, Queens, March 2023

Music Heals: Lydo

At how many BPM does the soul vibrate? The X-TRA.SERVICES founder’s first EP, self-released in collaboration with Tomás Urquieta, emblematizes techno without climax and the changing tempo of New York’s underground.

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#77
Lise Soskolne, The First and The Last , 2023, oil on canvas, 168 x 198 cm

Lise Soskolne, The First and The Last, 2023, oil on canvas, 168 x 198 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Galerie Last Friederich, Berlin

I Need Somebody

Can painting ever be made selflessly? At Galerie Lars Friederich, Berlin, WAGE co-founder Lise Soskolne locates the turning of private artistry toward public good in a politics of legibility.

People
Portrait of Peter Halley in front of Blue Cell with Triple Conduit 3 , Polaroid, 1986

Portrait of Peter Halley in front of Blue Cell with Triple Conduit 3, Polaroid, 1986

Playing a Forty-Year Game of Chess: An Interview with Peter Halley

What does Malevich have to do with McDonald’s? Closing out a retrospective of his paintings at Mudam Luxembourg, Halley flashes back to the heritage of the square, his recognition of ideal forms as prisons, and taking a shortcut to satirizing surface.

Views
#77
Cady Noland, Untitled , 2023 (detail), wood table, metal baskets, beer cans, coffee can, oil can, miscellaneous objects, and black vinyl, 91.5 x 162.5 x 199.5 cm. Photo: Kris Graves

Cady Noland, Untitled, 2023 (detail), wood table, metal baskets, beer cans, coffee can, oil can, miscellaneous objects, and black vinyl, 91.5 x 162.5 x 199.5 cm. All images: © Cady Noland. Courtesy: Gagosian. Photo: Kris Graves

Wise to the Game

Turning a corporate office into a crime scene, the new sculptures and Polaroid throwbacks of Cady Noland’s installation at Gagosian, New York zero in her inquest into star-spangled paranoia.

Discourse
Maison Margiela Haute Couture F/Winter 2017

Maison Margiela Haute Couture F/W 2017

Theory of Style: On Classics

Why do we dream of a fashion that suits everyone on every occasion? In her October column, Joanna Walsh muses over the concept of “classic” and the hard work of buckling social structures larger than your wardrobe.

Views
#77
View of “A Shimmer Through the Quantum Foam,” Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2023

View of “A Shimmer Through the Quantum Foam,” Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2023. All images © Anicka Yi. Courtesy: the artist, Gladstone Gallery, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Life in the Sea Is Like a Verb

Fragrant with sea musk, Anicka Yi’s debut exhibition with Esther Schipper, Berlin grafts generative AI and Cambrian zooplankton into one fruit-ripe family tree, one globulous tendril at a time.

Discourse
Martin Parr. The Last Resort New Brighton, England , 1983–85. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos. Courtesy: Rocket Gallery, London

Martin Parr, from the series “The Last Resort,”1983–85. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos. Courtesy: Rocket Gallery, London

In Heaven We Live in Two Dimensions

Photography documents people, who mimic in turn what they see in photos. In the medial vernacular of our digital era, are we more likely to find life in humans, or their mechanical images?

Views
#77
Lulu Obermayer,  Agoraphobia , performance, Grazer Schloßberg, Graz, 2023. Photo: steirischer herbst / Johanna Lamprecht

Lulu Obermayer, Agoraphobia, performance, Grazer Schloßberg, Graz, 2023. Photo: steirischer herbst / Johanna Lamprecht

From Every Depth of Good and Ill

With slap-in-the-face monuments, dances with buildings, and a water-gunning boy’s choir, steirischer herbst ’23 unearths Graz’s anti-fascist micro-histories while troubling the distinctions of oppressor and oppressed.

Spike Events
Florentina Holzinger, Étude For Church , 2023. Photo: Mayra Wallraff

Florentina Holzinger, Étude For Church, 2023. Photo: Mayra Wallraff

Hybrid Relationships: An Artist Talk by Nikola Knežević

On Tuesday, 17 October at Soho House Berlin, Nikola Knežević will expound on multi-agent stage design through his many colaborations with choreographer Florentina Holzinger.

Views
#77
Anita Steckel, Legal Gender , 1971, photolithograph, 7.5 cm x 16 cm. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Anita Steckel, Legal Gender, 1971, photolithograph, 7.5 cm x 16 cm. All images: © The Estate of Anita Steckel. Courtesy: The Estate of Anita Steckel; Ortuzar Projects, New York; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Desire without Ornament

At Wonnerth Dejaco, Vienna, a presentation of erectile drawings and out-of-scale collages revitalizes Anita Steckel’s questioning of embodied gender and benchmarks the transformation of sexual politics between her heyday and the present.

 

"The 80s was the last period when low self-esteem was a normative response to authority"

Essay: The Last Great Era of Low Self-Esteem