DEAN KISSICK is a writer and the author of the former Spike column “The Downward Spiral.” He lives in London.
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?
Spike’s founding publisher unwinds the magazine’s history of making space for artists, critics, and the rest of the Kunstbetrieb to be generous to what art is – without conceding to its rules.
What’s left from the year that was? A lucky septet of writers, curators, and artists review the sweetnesses lingering on their tongues and the splinters still stuck under their skins.
For his closing column at Spike, Dean Kissick wonders if the last six years have actually been spiraling downward and what comes next – the end of doom, or a new era of worse-still derangement?
Dimes Square is art, but also more (or less) than art: It’s life turned theater, real-world “autofiction,” belle époque for Substack. So, is it so distant from all our other forms of identity obsession?
New York’s autumn gallery exhibitions are many, so many, and pleasant, so pleasant, as palliatives for a doomed and dying world.
Comedian Nathan Fielder once rebranded a faltering coffee shop “Dumb Starbucks,” remodeled it like the chain, and, to escape litigation, claimed it as art – real-world Conceptualism, anyone?
Reflecting on the literary nature of AI-generated images.
Do bad artists know that they’re bad? Does it matter to NFT artists? And is bad taste, like Ed Hardy, back? A look at “ultra-modernity,” manufacturing demand, and images that weren’t made by humans.
Is the 59th Venice Biennale the final chapter of an exhausted story? Dean Kissick ponders how to abandon our screens for the real world and the real world for dreams.
Violent videos fill up art shows, TikTok feeds, and telegram chats as Palantir posters intermingle with French theory and underwear ads. This month, Dean Kissick wonders: how do we reckon with the chi...
Dean Kissick corresponds with two young arts workers from Ukraine – Kateryna Tykhonenko and Valeria Schiller – who share firsthand accounts of the war that is currently unfolding.
For his first column of 2022, Dean Kissick comes to us with a parable – or a prophecy?
With nostalgia takeing hold at the New Museum Triennial and MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York 2021,” Dean Kissick wonders: When art gets sucked back into tradition, where is the future to be found?
Have we blown past Peak Identity? On the heels of last month’s column, Dean Kissick considers how memes and masks have superseded the performance of the self.
Are we human, or are we content? Pondering Demna, Donda, the cult of celebrity, and the actual occult.
Ditching New York for warmer climes, where the plants are plentiful and the glare of backlit screens, blessedly scarce.
New York is going through a renaissance; a golden age for contrarians, Catholics, and chimera-denialists. On his first trip outside the city in a year and a half, Dean Kissick reflects on all that’s h...
Dean Kissick returns from a summer hiatus restored and brimming with hope. Eat vegetables, get Tao Lin-pilled, and revel in the beauty of the universe: “turn on, tune in, drop out” for the 2020s?
This May, Dean goes to Frieze, rolls his eyes at the Turner Prize shortlist, and sees New York opening up again.
Dean Kissick goes to the Frick Madison on a beautiful spring day.
You can run, but you can’t hide. On NFTs and the pervasiveness of mundane art.
For his first column of the new year, Dean Kissick finds solace and good omens in ornithology. The future looks not altogether unpromising.
Dean Kissick reviews a long, long year.
A lot’s changed in New York since we last heard from Dean in October. A president was elected and fresh plywood added to store façades, quickly blanketed in new graffiti hearts. Hope and the 5G conspi...
It’s fall so Dean goes on a gallery tour of Manhattan.
Dean’s latest column is an ode to the coming fall, where New York is struggles to bring normalcy back into play. But when was New York ever normal?
Dean takes us through the troubled beginnings of the 2020s, charting his own history in New York, and the timeline of events of the previous decade that brought us here. Writing is the best cure for a...
Dean Kissick was in New York when America rose up, and managed to both document and celebrate the protests that followed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the police.
Dean Kissick is in search of lost rays of the sun, in paintings. There is a certain kind of light, and it still seems to show on Proust, Vermeer, and kitties?
Deak Kissick writes from New York and the heart of the global pandemic. Nothing Dean or any of his friends say is medical advice.
The countryside is synonymous with health, escape, and so much else we desire under the threat of corona. This month, one exhibition that presents the nether reaches as just that: somewhere far away.
With the dawn of a new decade comes the possibility that all could begin good again. Why not? Dean Kissick treks from Mexico to New York in search of exhilaration, out of the glum and into glam and gl...
Watching Maurizio Cattelan’s banana spiral out of control.
Dean reads Natasha Stagg’s new essay collection Sleeveless and Fiona Duncan’s debut novel Exquisite Mariposa and begins to understand the 2010s.
Gucci’s Cruise campaign, directed by Harmony Korine and Alessandro Michele, stars rapper Gucci Mane, whose new album cover is shot by Korine and Michele stars Gucci. Pop eats itself in the twilight of...
Dean swims in the magic river. There’s a death on the island. And a visitor sails into the harbor.
This month, Dean discusses the embryonic monkey-human chimeras created by geneticists in California. It’s time to think again of what else we could be.
This month, Dean goes to the Norwegian countryside, contemplates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s retreat from society, and sees art return to its pagan origins in Marianne Heske’s latest work.
A love letter to Montez Press Radio.
We’re all writing stories together now. This month, Dean swims through the conspiracy theories surrounding the auction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.
This month, Dean went to the United Arab Emirates to visit Sharjah Biennial 14, curated by Zoe Butt.
An investigation into the goings-on in Goshen, home of a LEGOLAND in rural New York.
Dean visits the 6th Guangzhou Triennial, “As We May Think: Feedforward,” curated by Angelique Spaninks, Zhang Ga, and Philipp Ziegler.
What has Dean learned from the greatest city in the world?
Why beauty today wishes to float free of our bodies.
Paying a visit to Oregon’s Utopian Visions Art Fair.
Reading Book Six of Karl Ove Knausgård’s The End: My Struggle: a 1,153-page literary suicide note.
This month, Dean visits nineteen galleries on one summer’s day.
This month, Dean goes to a three-quarter-scale replica of an art bar in a gallery.
