Amid the latest revival of SPIRITUALITY in culture, Spike’s Summer 2026 issue asks: what are people reaching for beyond what can be measured?

With an exhibition at Fotografiska Berlin, an iconic and icon-making photographer considers the empathy of confrontational images and why making his best work is like street-fighting.

Mapping the recent internet’s clickbaits, rug pulls, and thirst traps, a Berlin exhibition insists that the only truth left in the digital image is its silhouette’s seduction.

Nuder, bloodier, and more bombastically stunty than ever, the Austrian choreographer’s latest toasts the body’s inexhaustible surprise and the backstage of spectacular images.

In the debut Spike Podcast, two “rival” columnists banter about Insta-galleries, critical discomfort, the star signs of poems, and the fact that artists are people, too.

AI has pushed the medium of modernity to a breaking point. Perhaps a necessary one, if we are ever to escape back to reality’s unstable, infinite, and unknowable ground.

At the 61st Venice Biennale, Alexandre Estrela discusses the origins of Apple wallpaper in “unspoiled” nature and why he turned the Portuguese Pavilion into a live seismograph.

Billy Bultheel, Alexander Iezzi, Ivan Cheng, and Cem Dukkha share the secret of their noisy, strobing, transcendent new album: cringe will set you free. Premiering the live video collab of “F**k U”

Year two of Helsinki Music Week showed that, if subculture is dead, it’s places like the Finnish capital that will resurrect DIY/punk – albeit in the key of neo-EDM.

A view-master tour of a very long weekend in artville Munich, from quantum physics and art for kids to a high-octane gallery crossover and painting’s key signatures from the Weimar Republic.

Where the iconic 2007 building mirrored a techno-optimist, post-internet culture, the institution’s latest expansion, by OMA, is a fitting home for digital art after the Great Weirding.

At a Biennale that doubles as a memorial to Koyo Kouoh, Henrike Naumann, and others, a Spike contributing editor stops to ask: what is art’s task in a world that deserves evermore mourning?

The artist behind @freeze_magazine takes in the thrills and spills of a too-sunny Gallery Weekend Berlin. Plus! a ranking of the best gardens for an apero.

In a new biopic set entirely in his studio, the archetypal Berlin artist plays both subject and saboteur. Is it a canny revival via self-exposure – or the last refuge of myth of the solitary genius?

Kids these days: how are they keeping on, as hypermediation threatens to glitch out the future? As it turns out, by doing what youth has always done: finding profound meaning in the most unexpected pl...

Under her direction since 2021, living up to first principles at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, colloquially the MAK, begins with knowing where the present is.

The designer behind Civilization, the new-look Interview, and the rollout of Rosalía’s latest album on the state of images and the untiring (ir)reason of magazines.

What can non-human performance art tell us about Moltbook, the much-hyped, Reddit-like forum for AI agents? That there’s an update underway to spectatorship’s terms and conditions.

If humanity can’t see a shrink about the climate crisis, what can art offer in shaking us awake? An artist known for deeply troubling what constitutes “Nature” muses from the KunstHausWien.

At a playful exhibition at Konschthal Esch, Luxembourg, the new media artist calls for letting meaning grow slowly in the viewer – and teases the notion of collecting a video 1000 years long.

Reimagining one’s gay self in pattern mash-ups from Op Art and AbEx to graffiti, Richard Hawkins’s Kunsthalle Wien exhibition frames painting as freedom quest – and an earthly pleasure besides.

Among dozens of his canvases at Kunsthalle Krems, the New York painter muses on finding one’s footing as a young artist when the world seems full of cons.

Memes-for-clothes and post-robotic aesthetics, DeepDream politics and fads that burned too hot, too fast – here Spike’s flashbulb views on another cracked year in culture.

Unlike the apocalypse films of yesteryear, in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia and Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, crises don’t breed heroes – just additional villains.

Long reserved for Germany’s next big thing in contemporary art, the awarding of the Preis der Nationalgalerie to the starry artist-entrepreneur is a sign of grim times to come.

The filmmaker’s latest work, screened at Berlinale 2025 and the Kyiv Biennial in Warsaw, is a rupture in the West’s post-War history of the Arab, the Jew, and the European.

The great-granddaughter of a Jewish Austrian collector returned to Salzburg to ask: What can we really expect of restitution?

For Allhallowtide, Spike’s digital editor visited the capital of European esoterism, taking in art’s imps, gore, incorruptible flesh – and even spooky action at a distance.

What keeps a critic going through Paris Internationale, Art Basel Paris, and a dozen exhibitions besides? Imagining the whole shebang happening in flip flops – plus a drop of culturally “useless” dew.

A hit novelist chases legitimacy through her dead editor – possibly reincarnated as a rat. Sharp, surreal, and merciless about ambition's psychic costs, the novel skewers the publishing world.

In her new philosophical history of the internet, Spike’s contributor and former columnist examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.

In New York, an art-duo-cum-label’s send-up of the working class women of Belle Époque France is scrappy, romantic, ferally alive.

At once titillating and encyclopedic, an exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg revisits the collapse of European socialism through the image economy of sex.

AI is co-spawning a visual culture beyond any imagination. Will an overthrow of good taste re-vest pictures with their mysterious power? Or are we chasing our machines into pastiche hell?

Ever-prescient, the multimedia artist and filmmaker’s new memoir crystallizes the extensions of the self unique to art.

By turns complimentary and combative, two leading lights of “post-internet cinema” talk out art’s responsibility to stay with the times, no matter how strange.

In Vienna, a former sex worker’s mash-up of broke pop, bad taste, and low-res funk beckons the outsider – and can be extremely slippery.