Billboard: Mark Leckey, »Taken-Out of the Place-You-Stand«, 2024
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An image for the showcase module titled, "SPIKE #84 – VULGARITY – IS OUT NOW!"
SPIKE #84 – VULGARITY – IS OUT NOW!

Featuring a theory of The Vulgar Image, sex-goddess tutorials, dick paintings, cocaine buffets, steal-wealth obscenities, rehumanization outside the law, hijacked vernaculars, Black entertainment paradoxes, institutional musclemen, the Cinema of Transgression, vulgar fashion, a history of kakistocracy, NASCAR’s prayers, Benneton ads, cutting-edge shitcoins, Las Vegas, and the difference between being a hot girl and wanting to fuck one.

It Our Duty to Win
By Nolan Kelly

By turns militant, satirical, and paranoiac, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another stages an opposition to US fascism beyond screenshotting tweets.

Look But Don’t Touch
By Travis Diehl

Why does performance art seem to be retreating behind a screen? The view from a strip club void of strippers.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Centre Pompidou
By Hans-Jürgen Hafner

In Paris, a library overflows with the alt-iconographic displays that made the photographer synonymous with visual culture’s last new normal.

Everyone Is Expensive and No One Is Real
By Erin Evans

What good is cut-rate, lookalike luxury if it can only be worn onscreen?

Unlucky Thirteen
By Pablo Larios

A Berlin Biennale more intent on crisis management than exhibition-making raises the question: Does the biennial format – and Berlin itself – still deliver?

Shrinkbots, Part I

By Adina Glickstein

So — your cousin’s seeing an AI therapist. What could possibly go wrong?

Two Waves Meeting Each Other: Mark Leckey & Bill Kouligas
By Spike Editorial Team

The British artist and the founder of PAN records harmonize on brands and arcana, waste and subculture, and music’s animalistic approach towards the future.

Does Anyone Here Care About Art Anymore?
By Andrew Key

Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, is a one-night pan of the art world’s obsessions with surfaces and being seen.

More than Noise, Almost the City: Berlin Atonal
By Spike Editorial Team

Laurel Halo, okkyung lee, Dimitri Hegemann, Alessandro Cortini, Valentina Magaletti, Shackleton, Ziúr, and Mark Reeder on a festival that has rewired local art, club culture, and avant-garde music.

After the Song of the Summer
By Greta Rainbow

What does Pop mean when the commodity has been overwhelmed by content? A view from dual solo shows by Laila Shawa and Esben Weile Kjær.

Hello, Cruel World!
By Travis Diehl

In the age of memetic outrage, can art find the courage to be ambivalent?

David Hockney at Fondation Louis Vuitton
By Pierre-Alexandre Mateos

Ranging from opera sets to iPad screens across hundreds of paintings, a Paris blockbuster edifies the British artist’s ability to make visible – yet never violate – intimacy.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation
By Adina Glickstein

The first edition of AIR, a lush, searching, firework-like festival at the Aspen Art Museum, raised the question: What makes art human?

The Perfect Berlin Meme
By John Holten

“Global refuge.” “Cosmopolitan nowhere.” Under a regime of rent hikes, right-wing politics, and violent censorship, what is becoming of a city whose image long amounted to artistic freedom?

How to Defile the Venice Biennale
By Travis Diehl

A far-right troll wants to hijack the US Pavilion. These days, might such a stunt be the most honest form of art?

Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Swirly Syntax
By Cara Schacter

In the New York author’s new novel, the media-core melodrama Little Pink Book, abuse of language comes as a so very sweet surprise.

Lygia Clark at Neue Nationalgalerie
By Ela Bittencourt

In Berlin, a highly interactive retrospective makes palpable the late Brazilian artist’s turn to touch as the occasion for psychic awakening.

Hito Steyerl: “Who Prompted All This Shit?”
By Günseli Yalcinkaya

The artist, filmmaker, and author of Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat grapples with magical thinking, implication in military-industrial AI, and machine learning’s many roads not taken.

Optimal Brain Damage
By Paul Feigelfeld

A lecture at Vienna Digital Cultures cuts through the soporific fog of “optimization” semantics to uncover AI-thoritarianism’s rising bid for power.

Big Showgirl Energy
By Susan Finlay

On femininity and fame in Philippa Snow’s new essay collection, It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me.

Sycophancy
By Alex Quicho

Drawing on feminized aesthetics and LLM performativity, a lecture at Vienna Digital Cultures scours user interactions with AI for our collective desires – among them, a little too much charm.

Neo-Futurism
By Adina Glickstein

As Silicon Valley adopts a century-old movement’s aesthetics, Spike’s editor at large resumes her tech column to ask: What forces compel us to reach back to some romanticized past?

7pm in Vienna
By Aodhan Madden

GHB clocks, newly drawn brains, stoned computers – a three-day tour of the annual festival Independent Space Index uncovered the city’s offspace unconscious.

:::Feel The Future:::
By Lil Internet

A lecture at Vienna Digital Cultures eulogizes a fading era of the internet, drawing on pre-millennial cyberspace, a post-millennial return of cyber occultism, and the Golem of Prague.