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?

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.

As the Cybercene cloud closes in on the mind, four artists – Bedros Yeretzian, Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Marc Kokopeli, and Flora Hauser – are hazarding escapes into the present as an unfinished script...

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

Can words ever really capture the tang of sour milk? Torbjørn Rødland, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Yair Oelbaum are making photos that indulge the tongue’s less speakable pleasures.

Transcending relational aesthetics, a New York retrospective catalogues the artist’s troubling of Western objecthood and the commodification of “Tiravanija” in a globalized art world.

In Paris, expressive ambivalence gives way to a lyrical defiguration of sameness, as the self holds on tight through the world’s psychoses.