TRAVIS DIEHL is a writer, editor, and critic based in New York. From 2024 to 2026, he wrote the monthly arts-and-culture column “Libra Season.”
In his final monthly dispatch for Spike, Travis Diehl asks what criticism is good for – and finds answers among dead rats, shuttered restaurants, and September openings in New York.
What can professional wrestling teach contemporary art? A ringside look at an art world that has lost the shared purpose, if not the antagonism, that made aesthetic conflict matter.
What if this year’s great epic isn’t The Odyssey, but Jackass? An unlikely reading of two very different spectacles of alliance, war, and masculinity – from selfish heroics to gonzo brotherhood.
In the debut Spike Podcast, two “rival” columnists banter about Insta-galleries, critical discomfort, the star signs of poems, and the fact that artists are people, too.
From an AI-vision conference and chalk-art velociraptors, to Dataland and an Ab-Ex museum, a trip to the American West asks what escapes the logic of abstraction.
In an age of financial panic and collapsing support systems, artists are turning transactions into art. Is it radical honesty, or total resignation?
Contemporary art can tear down symbols, but it rarely rivals the beliefs that built them. Can an art of the now speak beyond the present?
No title, no theme, no didacticism, plenty of kids and pets: the 2026 Whitney Biennial narrows its gaze as the world comes apart. Is this conflict-avoidance – or a subtle politics of fragility?
Looksmaxxers, Muskism, and the memetic fantasy of domination. A dispatch on virality – and on how art can spread otherwise.
The Epstein Files won’t tell us what we don’t already know. The redactions will. A meditation on blackout as ethics, fetish, and aesthetic form.
Nine months on view, reference overload, virtue beyond dispute – Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim New York. How did art world arcana end up both gatekeeping and selling tickets?
Transcending the present sounds like negligence, but confessing belief is cringe. The latest edition of Performa wrestles with sincerity and the means of political art.
The shock-of-the-new is back in literature, rebooted for screen time – and with it, the question: To what end should writing reflect our networked selves?
Why does performance art seem to be retreating behind a screen? The view from a strip club void of strippers.
In the age of memetic outrage, can art find the courage to be ambivalent?
A far-right troll wants to hijack the US Pavilion. These days, might such a stunt be the most honest form of art?
What do you do when the culture wars come for public art by zeroing out your grants? Throw another dinner. This month, Travis Diehl reports from the crisis-y head tables of NYC’s benefit extravaganza.
A Bitcoin bar, a fake AI art show, a painfully sincere afterparty, and the ghost of Ireland – inside the delusional overlap of tech evangelism and Western decline.
One leader’s memeification shows deceit is no longer just a tactic – it’s their shameless appeal.
Amid right-wing sanitization of gender, art, and so much else, could homebrewed video games be the best refuge for the core strangeness of experience?
Los Angeles is on fire – again. When disasters feel like AI text prompts, what can’t be predicted or replaced?
How do you distinguish resolve from resistance to change? Every new year, we tend to cling to our resolutions – but 2025 is high time to learn from their very doubtfulness.
Following Trump’s slop-fueled, broligarchic triumph, one poll worker asks: How can art get back to turning clout into power?
Art tries to broaden your mind; food actually does. Travis Diehl’s new monthly column, “Libra Season,” chronicles the art world of the overwrought 2020s, starting with a salad.
In an era of doxxing and cancellation, nobody wants to be the culture war’s next lightning rod. But if art’s new survivalism can be frustrating, it should also prompt us to ask who art is really for.
The South Korean artist’s oozing, wheezing sculptures show the difference between flesh and machines to be uncomfortably small.
In New York, Atkins’s new videos magic away the fourth wall between art and audience and manifest the grotesqueries of getting too close.
