New York is its own mythology, but, like that of the American Dream, it's broken. Yet it stays alive in the wit, ambition, resilience, and general badassery of the people who live there amid the false promises of capitalist excess and nostalgia. From our living rooms to yours, this issue looks at what's going on in the scattered brains of the metropolis that once upon a time stole the idea of modern art from Paris, and is still where Europe most often turns when it seeks wisdom from afar. We learned from this issue that it would be great to be either a yuppie's gay mistress or a secular adult virgin, and that we missed our chance to all be wearing bibs from Barneys.
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.
