ISSUE 81/82 (AUTUMN/WINTER 2024 – ANNIVERSARY ISSUE): The Post-Cool

 

As Spike turns twenty, what does it mean to do culture Post-Cool? Launching the same year as The Facebook (now an AI auto-spam singularity), Berghain (subject to boycott), and the first EP by Kanye West (need we say more?), how do we retrain the spotlight on art that deals productively with the world?

 

Spike is CELEBRATING 20 YEARS of bringing this same generosity to art with a special double issue. Cultural protagonists in Berlin, Vienna, and New York piece together momentous changes in Spike’s home cities, while founding publisher Rita Vitorelli narrates running the mag as an artist to Dean Kissick, underscored by reprints of seminal essays by the likes of Chris Kraus and Bruce Hainley. Further highlights are Taylor Swift as a millennial paracetamol; Silicon Valley optimizing the body for forever; video games as escapeways back into reality; and white-cube presentations of handicrafts, slot machines, and the choreographic turn. 

 

Plus! A POSTER timeline of art’s defining moments since 2004.

 

____

 

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike is a bilingual English/German contemporary art magazine, online platform and event space. The flagship print magazine Spike Art Quarterly is aimed at sustaining a vigorous, independent and meaningful art criticism. Essays by leading critics and curators are complemented by other formats offering room for polemics, meditations, and short answers to urgent questions. Published four times a year, Spike offers its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.