Spike Art Magazine is a Berlin-based quarterly magazine on contemporary art offering independent, meaningful and accessible art criticism.
Originally founded in Vienna by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike features essays and analysis by leading critics, curators and thinkers on artists making work relevant to and in many cases impacting on current developments or issues from the aesthetic to the technical. Situated between art theory and practice, it's a magazine not afraid of controversy and provocation.
About Issue 80: The State of the Arts, from the publisher:
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.
With 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; and so much more.
