Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Dance Floor), 1996

In 1996, the Polish artist’s minimalist floor sculpture recast Gavin Brown’s NYC gallery as a disco, distilling the elation of dance and the melancholy of its era’s unfulfillable promise.

Art of the Decade

Spike asked ten writers to climb out of the sludge of the present and think about what works of the 2010s remain in memory. The texts that follow and the art discussed can be read as both symptoms of their time and documents of what has changed and what has stayed the same: a testament to what matters now, and why. Their disparate selections show what a strange decade it was: one in which there was little to no consensus, little to no canon, little to no stars, lots of questioning, with the occasional ashes of honesty, revelation, insight, and excitement.

Portrait Albert Oehlen

Portrait Heimo Zobernig

It’s happened: everyone’s an artist. It isn’t creativity that has led to success, but rather the employability and willing exploitation of the all-rounder. At least this is what Daniel Baumann claims, in conversation with Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig. Zobernig keeps his cool and sees, above all, feuilleton-thought at work. Are they going to fight? Whoever is right, one thing is certain: all this endless talk about context is eating up art.