Spike Art Magazine #85 – Nostalgia

For Autumn 2025, Spike is cutting through the déjà vu aura around contemporary culture. 

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 anti-sentimentality 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; Artist’s Favorites by Diego Marcon; filmmaker Johan Grimonprez identifies with the hijacker in his documentary dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997); art historian Lynn Zelevansky on “New York/New Wave” at P.S.1 Contemporary (1981); Sean Monahanforecasts our old-fashioned future; image contributions by Megan Plunkett, Len Schweder, Cora Pongracz, Paul Niedermayer, and Ken Kagami; Martin Herbert’s portrait of kitsch-savant artist Friedrich Kunath; Aodhan Madden on Marc Kokopeli, Bedros Yeretzian, Flora Hauser, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola making analog-ish art “under” the internet; cultural critic Rosanna McLaughlin on missing the white cube; ex-dealers Margaret Leeand Jeff Poe talk escaping the art game whole; Whitney Mallett on rebranding celebrity through book culture; artist Maja Bajevic’s Yugostalgic report from Sarajevo; 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! 

About

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike is a 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.