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 76: An Artist's Life
Spike Issue 76 is dedicated to the artist. From the ultracontemporaries to those whose success came too late to be enjoyed, this issue is about aging, enduring, and surviving death, in their works as much as their stories. How can an artist emerge in our oceanic present, faced with the internet’s image infinity, a penetrating market, and ever murkier prospects? And why, having emerged, do some artists fail – what kills their careers? Barry Schwabsky looks at early periods versus late styles, Cindy Sherman talks about abstracting getting older, and Lauren Elkin suggests a way out of the snares of biography by re-centering art itself.