Spike Art Quarterly #56

Issue 56

The culture wars are raging. Neoliberalism and right-wing populism have co-opted the critique of the 1960s and turned it against art, science and the democratic public sphere, while the left is consumed by infighting. This issue is about the return to battle, strategies of (dis-)engagement, and the question of what art is capable of in the aftermath of the great weirding.

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike is a bilingual German/English contemporary art magazine aimed 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.