Spike Art Quarterly Kunstmagazin #53

The Real doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is shaped by desire and ideology, fiction and art. Its borders are indistinct, its appeal dubious, its essence elusive. Maybe we live in a simulation. When’s the last time you experienced a glitch? Sometimes another reality intrudes into the one we thought we knew and changes us forever. This issue of Spike looks at the real as a fault-line of art and a utopian horizon of its agency. Welcome to the oasis of the real!

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.