How do you do culture in a distracting and fragmented mediascape? If age-old strategies of amplification and withdrawal no longer work, art must find a new way to deal with the noise of crisis.

As the Art World descends on Venice’s canals for the 60th Biennale, Spike’s hedonist columnist dishes out the best way to get drunk between bridges and where to eat like Hemingway.

Is Western liberalism really on its deathbed? Four voices in art and politics convene for a roundtable on censorship, what the hell is happening in Germany, and art’s role on the precipice of doom.

The director of Fresh Kill reflects on fusing gender hacking, queer media activism, and a parable of environmental racism into a (newly restored) avant-anarcho eco-satire.

A journey into the sugary heart of gay romance, from yaoi to E.M. Forster, raises the question: Why is gay happiness so controversial? Is it just because they’re having better sex?

Beyond affirming that fashioning a new self is often a matter of class, the French author’s coming-out auto-fiction is a cold, hard accounting of being bored shitless.

Inspired by Octavia Butler’s sci-fi, a Munich exhibition centered on live simulation and painting’s latent space suggests how post-human interbreeds might perceive.

Drawn from martial arts, the fantasy of an underworld peopled by noble outcasts has marked decades of Chinese cinema and recent art on the coincidences of immigrant life.

Need a foot massage during Art Basel Hong Kong? A Spike confidante has some suggestions – and plenty of tips on the city’s best dim sum, speakeasies, and cha chaang tengs.

In Vienna, bold figurative paintings by Cathrin Hoffmann, Laurent Proux, and Pieter Schoolwerth render the nightmarish gaps between visceral and virtual realities.

What happened during LA art week? A little woo woo for white women, Eartheater doing her occult thing, some shop talk about drugs. But there are rich people complaining everywhere these days.

Her second choreography with Adèle Haenel raises the question: Is talking through childhood trauma an ode to new beginnings, or just another turn round an endless carousel?

For half a century, the “sculptural” performance artist, now the subject of a MoMA retrospective, has used shards of myth and ritual to cut into history’s repetitions and the images they yield.

A radical Minimalist talks seeing custom choppers in the lineage of readymades and feeling lost in a century where art has no limits.

In a one-man battle with Reddit, the hype cycle, and AI deepfakes for control over his output, the rapper is pushing his artistic identity to the breaking point.

In memory of René Pollesch (1962–2024), a 2005 conversation with Olaf Nicolai distills the late Volksbühne director’s onstage commitment to affirming his collaborators’ lives in all their messy specif...

Technoromanticism may find the sublime by devirtualizing online culture – or usher in an end-times of Gothic circuit board worship.

In Rome, an encyclopedic show of anti-commodities, auto-documentations, and studies in emptiness typifies an Arte Povera prankster’s conviction that work is unfinishable.

Jailbreaking the algorithmic violence of Big Tech’s new toys, the Brooklyn-based artist creates shelters for nuance amid the growing storm of datification.

In Linz, a playground of inflatables, wearables, and other whimsical inventions refresh the art and architecture group’s utopianism for our gloomy present.

Fresh off Paris Fashion Week, Local luminaries Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient on false timelessness, what not to wear in the Alps, and which of their looks get scanned twice at airport security.

In Vienna, the kid-avatar of “DIY or DIE” is barely big enough to play their guitar.