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Do bad artists know that they’re bad? Is bad taste, like Ed Hardy, back? In his June column, Dean Kissick explores value and taste by looking 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? In his May column, Dean Kissick ponders how identity became the biggest elephant in the rooms of mega exhibitions, and 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. This month, Dean Kissick wonders: how do we reckon with the chilling fog of content?
Henryk Streng/Marek Włodarski, Childhood Memories (1924). Henryk Streng was born in Lwów, Poland (present-day Lviv, Ukraine) in 1903. In 1942 he destroyed all of his documents and acquired new papers under the name of “Marek Włodarski.”
With nostalgia taking hold at The New Museum Triennial and MoMA PS1’s survey of Greater New York, Dean Kissick wonders: what’s so great about it? When art gets sucked back into tradition, where is the future to be found?
Have we blown past the point of Peak Identity? Continuing on the heels of last month’s column, Dean Kissick considers how memes and masks have superseded the performance of the self.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? Dean Kissick ponders Demna Gvasalia, Donda, the cult of celebrity, and the actual occult in this month’s Downward Spiral.
New York is going through a renaissance; a golden age for contrarians, Catholics, and chimera-denialists. On the occasion of his first trip outside the city in a year and a half, Dean Kissick reflects on all that’s happened in the interim.
Dean Kissick returns from his summer hiatus (ascetic, solitary research, perhaps?), restored and brimming with renewed hope. Eat vegetables, get Tao Lin-pilled, and revel in the beauty of the universe: the modern-day equivalent of "turn on, tune in, drop out"?
A lot’s changed in New York since we last heard from Dean Kissick in October. A president was elected and fresh plywood added to store façades, quickly blanketed in new graffiti hearts. Hope and the 5G conspiracy are pretty tricky things.
DEAN KISSICK’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 KISSICK 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 amnesia.
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?
The countryside is synonymous with the desires for escape, health, self-sustainability, and many other things that might well describe the current mood under the threat of corona. DEAN KISSICK weighs in on 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 start over, be good again. DEAN KISSICK takes us on a journey in search of exhiliration in art, theatre, and elsewhere. Follow his trek from Mexico to New York, out of the glum and into glam and glee.
What did you get for Valentine’s Day? Some New Yorkers were treated to a unique blend of sexual energy and frustration in Irena Haiduk’s “Cabaret Économique”, performed at the Swiss Institute, New York.
Salvage Art Institute, SAI 0015: materials: aluminium, porcelain; size 10 x 10 cm; damage: 12/24/2008, shattered in fall; claim 05/11/2009; total loss: 05/20/2009; production: 1995; artist: Jeff Koons; title: Red Ballon Dog Ed. 51/66
DEAN KISSICK reads Natasha Stagg’s new essay collection Sleeveless and Fiona Duncan’s debut novel Exquisite Mariposa and begins to understand the 2010s.
Gucci’s new Cruise campaign, directed by Harmony Korine and Alessandro Michele, stars rapper Gucci Mane. Gucci Mane’s new album cover, shot by Harmony Korine and Alessandro Michele, stars Gucci. Pop continues to eat itself. Nothing means anything here, in the twilight of the 2010s.
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 Kissick goes to the Norwegian countryside, contemplates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s retreat from society and sees art’s return to its pagan origins in artist Marianne Heske’s latest project
Cruising Pavilion make shows exploring the architectural aspects of cruising culture. They’re interested in widening the definition of “cruising” to mean more than just gay men looking for sex with strangers in public spaces. By Dean Kissick
An interview with Asad Raza, D. Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven about their experimental project Schema for a school which was part of the show A Prelude to the Shed in New York.
In his column Dean Kissick writes about Neïl Beloufa's controversial show "L'Ennemi de mon ennemi" at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and explores what it says about protest in our "byzantine circulatory system of images"
In his first column of 2018 Dean Kissick writes about going crazy for crypto. How did the blockchain's promise of immutable truth turn into an opaque cultural spectacle?
In his column Dean Kissick writes about the second season of the BBC's Blue Planet and finds a swansong for a disappearing natural world full of bizarre beauty. Soon, science and technology may furnish us with an imaginary and perhaps still stranger world.
In his column Dean Kissick writes about Sophia, the first robot to be granted citizenship by a country. But as a female humanoid robot, she says more about humans' lack of imagination than the new forms and relationships that lie ahead of us.
We are on the edge of the abyss, but nobody seems to really care. In his latest column Dean Kissick writes about how the present threat of a nuclear war gets lost in the memeification of reality and politics
Jordan Wolfson Real violence, 2017, (Installation view) Virtual reality headsets, high-definition video, color, Sound; 2:25 min. 2017 Whitney Biennial ( March 17-June 11, 2017). Collection of the artist; courtesy David Zwirner, New York, and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
This has been a year of disappearing statues, but what will become of all the defaced idols and broken images? Dean Kissick on why iconoclasm is back and what we can do about its aftermath.
In this month’s column, Dean Kissick writes about what happens when subcultures emerge from the underbelly of the internet, Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, and how the culture wars of the 90s have come back to haunt us
M.I.A's campaign to help greenwash H&M is a catastrophe. Edward Snowden is collaborating with Jean-Michel Jarre on a techno track. Lady Gaga visited Assange when he was first on the lam. All of this is totally horrible and wrong. Dean Kissick explains why and asks: How powerful is soft power? And what does it mean to be "radical chic" today?
Dean Kissick discusses the shifting value of the term “artist” in our current state of global affairs and the complicity between Comedien Nathan Fielder and political figures from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin.
If 72% of 18 to 25-year-olds say they can express their feelings better though using emojis than words what does that mean for the future of written language? Dean Kissick discuses Starbucks conspiracy theories, ordering Domino’s pizza and if heartbreak can be conveyed by pictures of anthropomorphic food.
After a night on the town, Dean Kissick takes a stroll through Las Vegas. He comes across hope and misery, Mike Tyson and a stripper with a real bullet wound.
De-evolution against the existential terror of everyday life is still trending. The designer Thomas Thwaites commissioned a set of special prosthetics and decided to spend a couple of days living as a goat. His experiment makes Dean Kissick think about modern communication, the Paleo diet, ancient satyrs, and Miley Cyrus.
From Donald Trump to Rihanna, True Detective, and 50 Cent: this summer a new theatricality has become evident in American culture. The congruence of camp and violence has given us Young Thug, a rapper who calls his guns “dicks” for reasons nobody knows.
Of course you've already seen the pictures Juergen Teller took of himself with the rapper Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian, the Inventress of Selfie. Our author explains why it takes an age of the grotesque to make Kim's posterior into a work of art.
![Geoffrey Mak in front of "Avery Singer: Reality Ender" at Hauser & Wirth, New York.](https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/medium_square_400/public/users/shared/articles/images/geoffmak_averysinger.jpg?itok=lBunYztR "Geoffrey Mak in front of "Avery Singer: Reality Ender" at Hauser & Wirth, New York.")
![Video still from Coca-Cola's 1971 commercial "I want to teach the world to sing"](https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/medium_square_400/public/users/shared/articles/images/maxresdefault.jpg?itok=EZ8POkki "Video still from Coca-Cola's 1971 commercial "I want to teach the world to sing"")
