Summer issue, featuring: Travis Diehl on riskless art; Domenick Ammirati on getting ahead by getting hot; Anna Kornbluh on culture as pure vibe; Daniel Baumann on the impossibility of succeeding as a curator; an interview with painter and gallerist Jamian Juliano-Villani; Aodhan Madden on the trash girl art of Maggie Lee, Ser Serpas & K8 Hardy; Jaakko Pallasvuo and
Kristian Vistrup Madsen talk trying (and failing) to drop out of the art world; a guide to decentralized social media;
Marina Abramović's secret to longevity; a postcard from Riyadh;
Nicolas Bourriaud on this year's Venice Biennale...
A sense of major flux is spreading in the art world—and not only among its pessimists. Under pressure from reactionary politics and its own "now more than ever" imperatives, so much in art is transforming: criticism into a flashy rubber stamp; art schools into trauma industries; fairs into 3D-PDFs; museums into everything for everybody; and art-making into a moral protocol.
Some artists are responding by dropping out, going Web3, or protesting genocide; a few are launching their own galleries or wellness brands; plenty are still just painting painting painting.
This issue is point of reference so that the next time we go off road, we can find a way back to our last clear perspective—a bit jaded, a little dizzy, but faithful as ever that artists are finding our way forward.
Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike (Spike Art Quarterly) is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art published in English which aims at sustaining a vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism. At the heart of each issue are feature essays by leading critics and curators on artists making work that plays a significant role in current debates. Situated between art theory and practice and ranging far beyond its editorial base in Vienna and Berlin, Spike is both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic. Spike's renowned pool of contributing writers, artists, collectors and gallerists observe and reflect on contemporary art and analyse international developments in contemporary culture, offering its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.
