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.

Opening a solo exhibition at M Leuven, the Polish sculptor opines about sleights of hand with big rocks, teaching against the identitarian grain, and what art might come after perfection.

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 this year’s Berlinale 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.

The new artistic co-director of Tanzquartier Wien envisions dance as a practice of hospitality – with Vienna’s many publics as her guests.

By turns militant, paranoiac, and deeply satirical, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film stages an opposition to US fascism beyond screenshotting tweets.

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

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

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

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.

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

What can Pop possibly mean when the commodity has been overwhelmed by content? A view from dual shows by Laila Shawa and Esben Weile Kjær at the Salzburger Kunstverein.

“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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

A new collection of New York club dispatches alchemizes the dancefloor’s utopian politics, animal debauchery, and many ghostly pasts.

Precious Okoyomon, quori theodor, and Bobbi Salvör Menuez’s food art is sliming the psychic space between the body’s holes – and might just “turn” you trans. Republished from Spike #83 – Food.

If Carlo Ratti’s design showcase is bloated, messy, and somewhat too disinterested in aesthetics, its address of climate crisis also abounds with a rare quality for 2025: optimism.

Headed to art’s big bazaar on the knee of the Rhine? Don’t miss the city’s best croissants, a Friends-themed dive bar, and a dancefloor worth the queue.

The new director of Kunsthalle Zürich on thinking translationally, pulling out all the stops for artists, and a city coming into its cultural own.

In a six-hour performance-installation at Funkhaus, Vienna, over-direction stymies the bleed between make-believe hospice and real-life aging and dying.

What did algorithms ever do for visual culture but dumb it down? Artists, it turns, out, have been evolving a new form in the unlikeliest of corners: YouTube.

In a festival brimming with doom and gloom, a film by Joachim Trier won Cannes’s Grand Prix by offering its characters a choice to mend.