So – where is 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 updated those themes for 2023, amid a radical vibe shift and AI cranking anxieties about creativity under capitalism to ever-weirder highs.

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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.