Dean Kissick is a writer and the author of the former Spike column “The Downward Spiral.” He lives in London.
Spike’s founding publisher unwinds the magazine’s history of making space for artists, critics, and the rest of the Kunstbetrieb to be generous to what art is – without conceding to its rules.
What’s left from the year that was? A lucky septet of writers, curators, and artists review the sweetnesses lingering on their tongues and the splinters still stuck under their skins.
For his closing column at Spike, Dean Kissick wonders if the last six years have actually been spiraling downward and what comes next – the end of doom, or a new era of worse-still derangement?
Dimes Square is art, but also more (or less) than art: It’s life turned theater, real-world “autofiction,” belle époque for Substack. That is, is it so distant from all our other forms of identity obs...
New York’s autumn gallery exhibitions are many, so many, and pleasant, so pleasant, as palliatives for a doomed and dying world.
Comedian Nathan Fielder once rebranded a faltering coffee shop “Dumb Starbucks,” remodeled it like the chain, and, to escape litigation, claimed its ventis as art – a Conceptualist work in the real wo...
In this month’s installment of “The Downward Spiral,” Dean Kissick reflects on the literary nature of AI-generated images.
Some years ago, I went out with some friends to Trisha’s, a basement bar in Soho in London, and after a few drinks a stylist, quite austere, softly spoken, leant over to me and asked quietly, “Do all ...
Is the 59th Venice Biennale the final chapter of an exhausted story? In his May column, Dean Kissick ponders how identity became the biggest elephant in the rooms of mega exhibitions, and how to aband...
Violent videos fill up art shows, TikTok feeds, and telegram chats as Palantir posters intermingle with French theory and underwear ads. This month, Dean Kissick wonders: how do we reckon with the chi...
Dean Kissick corresponds with two young arts workers from Ukraine – Kateryna Tykhonenko and Valeria Schiller – who share firsthand accounts of the war that is currently unfolding.
For his first column of 2022, Dean Kissick comes to us with a parable (or a prophecy?).
With nostalgia taking hold at the New Museum Triennial and MoMA PS1’s survey of Greater New York, Dean Kissick wonders: When art gets sucked back into tradition, where is the future to be found?
Have we blown past the point of Peak Identity? Continuing on the heels of last month’s column, Dean Kissick considers how memes and masks have superseded the performance of the self.
Are we human, or are we content? Dean Kissick ponders Demna Gvasalia, Donda, the cult of celebrity, and the actual occult in this month’s Downward Spiral.
Dean Kissick ditches New York for warmer climes to preview this year’s Bienal de São Paulo, where the plants are plentiful and the glare of backlit screens, blessedly scarce.
New York is going through a renaissance; a golden age for contrarians, Catholics, and chimera-denialists. On his first trip outside the city in a year and a half, Dean Kissick reflects on all that’s h...
Dean Kissick returns from his summer hiatus (ascetic, solitary research, perhaps?), restored and brimming with renewed hope. Eat vegetables, get Tao Lin-pilled, and revel in the beauty of the universe...
This May, Dean goes to Frieze, rolls his eyes at the Turner Prize shortlist, and sees New York opening up again.
If history were written solely by the victors, the world would soon forget about the militant environmental activists of the 1990s. On both sides of the Atlantic, radical grassroots movements wanted t...
Dean Kissick goes to the Frick Madison on a beautiful spring day.
You can run but you can’t hide. Dean Kissick on NFTs and the pervasiveness of mundane art.
For his first column of the new year, Dean Kissick finds solace and good omens in ornithology. The future looks not altogether unpromising.
Dean Kissick reviews a long year.
