Spike #70 – Web3

Spike #86 is turning to the wild season of youth – life’s Salad Days.

Forget all the Boomer panic about a generational crisis; the kids are alright, living out our hyperconnected present to its strangest limits. New kinds of aesthetics, of activism, of entrepreneurship; new images as much as new perspectives on what images are; and, above all, a new, very quantum attitude towards fact and fiction, history and the future: young people are modeling how to be in our very confused times – and producing some of the most interesting forms of culture we’ve ever seen.

Featuring a Zoomer’s guide to the Slopgeneration; an essay of on being young at art in the Instagram age; a rundown of contemporary art’s nepo babies; reality checks on culture’s obsessions with youth and dying young; portraits of couture-sculptor Tenant of Culture, Turner Prize-nominated photographer Rene Matić, e-waste sculptor Brian Oakes, and Austrian painter Lukas Posch; send-ups of teenage fiction’s ecstatic weirdness and youth-quakers’ political promise; a critique from Silicon Valley of the industrialization of young risk-taking; art’s perfect Los Angeles metaphor; and a splash of back-page advice: “You shouldn’t be fun at twenty-one. You should be tortured.” 

For Fall 2025, Spike is getting to the bottom of the vintage aura around contemporary culture: Nostalgia. 

Are we doomed to ever-shorter cycles of cash-cow retromania, until AI memory-wipes us with pure simulation? Or is the root problem of our endless déjà vu actually the expectation that art "make it new," itself just so much nostalgia for a long-gone modernism? We're working out what the present owes to the past, if our goal is to conjure a better culture for tomorrow.

Featuring Jeppe Ugelvig's essay on the art world's uses and misuses of nostalgia; Simon Reynolds and Adina Glickstein talk exhausting the past; e-girl/theorist Alex Quicho critiques the end of newness; filmmaker Johan Grimonprez identifies with the hijacker in his dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997); a portrait of kitsch-savant painter Friedrich Kunath; cultural critic Rosanna McLaughlin on missing the white cube; Artist's Favorites by Diego Marcon; ex-dealers Margaret Lee and Jeff Poe escape the art game; Whitney Mallett on rebranding celebrity through book culture; making analog-ish art "under" the internet with Marc Kokopeli, Bedros Yeretzian, Flora Hauser, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola; Sean Monahan forecasts our old-fashioned future; art historian Lynn Zelevansky on "New York/New Wave" at P.S.1 Contemporary (1981); artist Maja Bajevic's Yugostalgic report from Sarajevo; and Tea Hačić-Vlahović getting dewy-eyed catching up to her mother's age; plus, reviews of exhibitions by Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans, Women's History Museum, and more.

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike (Spike Art Quarterly) is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art published in English which aims at sustaining a vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism. At the heart of each issue are feature essays by leading critics and curators on artists making work that plays a significant role in current debates. Situated between art theory and practice and ranging far beyond its editorial base in Vienna and Berlin, Spike is both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic. Spike's renowned pool of contributing writers, artists, collectors and gallerists observe and reflect on contemporary art and analyse international developments in contemporary culture, offering its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.

4ème numéro de l'épopée lesbienne en épisodes par la collective Fusion, ce recueil d'aventures se lit dans n'importe quel ordre.

How to Sleep Faster 2 is the second of our biannually published journals that form the backbone of Arcadia Missa’ critical collaborative discourse on participation, post-digital visual-production and institutional subjectivity.This issue explores moments of collapse, shift and potential in a cultural moment framed by economic, political and societal disturbance.

Arcadia Missa Publication; eds Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark et al.

Phylactère est une revue annuelle à voix multiples, née du désir d’explorer l’écriture de l’oralité et les possibilités de retranscription de performance, à travers des visions authentiques, subjectives et spontanées. Donnant la parole à des amateur·ice·s, artiste·s, designer·s et penseur·se·s, la revue Phylactère regroupe des écrits de transition, assumant tous les glissements entre un script, l’action réalisée et sa traduction, avec une attention extrême et aventureuse pour la manière dont les contextes, gestes, émotions et espaces sont mis en jeu lors de cette retranscription.

Initiée par Roxanne Maillet et Auriane Preud’homme à l’invitation de Camille Videcoq lors de la résidence Entrée Principale (Marseille), Phylactère conjugue pratique graphique et éditoriale et démarche curatoriale en intégrant au processus de publication l’organisation de différents événements. 

Pour son deuxième numéro, Phylactère prend pour titre l’onomatopée Oh là là !

Avec les contributions de : Anne Lise Le Gac, Benoît Le Boulicaut, Camille Videcoq, Cecil Serres, Claudia Pagès, Considered to be Allies (Margaux Parillaud & Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen), Ghita Skali, Giuliana Zefferi, Lauren Tortil, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Mona Gérardin-Laverge, Nygel Panasco, pauline l. boulba, Sarah Browne, Susie Green (with Kim Coleman, Simon Bayliss & Rory Pilgrim), Tahnee, L’autre and Tiziana La Melia.

Conception graphique : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet.

Typeface by Bea Schlingelhoff, from the Project "Women against Hitler"

Eric Bell & Kristoffer Frick: Rainbow Rope, 2017 1, Crystal Table (II), 2017 2, 63, Platonic Solid, 2018 64, Kolumne 3, Sara MacKillop: WC2N 4, 10, 15, 24, California Cannabis Legalization 9, Letzte Ausgabe der Spartakusbriefe, Oktober 1918 11, Delia Gonzales 16-21, Cordula Daus 22, Christina Irrgang 25, Eric Ellingsen 26, Hugo Canoilas: L’ô 29, 30, 35-38, Sadie Plant 31, Markus Krottendorfer: aus der Serie TERMINAL, 2017 32, Kate Rich: Feral Trade 39, Julia Knass 44, Walter Hetzer: World Trade Center 1972 46, Lidl, Wiedner Hauptstraße 15, Wien (ehemals Generali Foundation, gebaut 1993-95, Architektur Jabornegg & Pálffy) 50, One Hour and a Half in the Life of Ztscrpt 62-52

This issue uses the font designed for german news magazine Spiegel by amazing Lucas de Groot. The color poster is part of the full print of the series “Les Filles d’Amsterdam” by photographer Jean-Luc Moulène. It is the first time this series is printed in book form and in an exclusive interview the artist tells the story of that work.

Contributors: Lily Wittenburg, Maren Grimm & Jakob Krameritsch, Michael Milano, Assaf-Evron, Sophie Thun, Juliana Huxtable, Interview with Jean-Luc Moulène, poster by Jean-Luc Moulène, Magda Tóthová, Peter Machen on Brenda Fassie, Mariah Garnett, Shady El NoshokatyTommy Støckel