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.
