From algorithmic earworms to machine-made music and immersive exhibitions, Spike’s Autumn 2026 issue asks why contemporary art is so obsessed with sound.

Has the apocalypse already happened? And, if so, is 21st-century pop culture, with all its nostalgia, just catching up? The author of Semiotics of the End goes looking for signs the future is not lost.

Out of godly love or fear of a lawsuit, a new “biopic” of Sam Altman never gets close to the OpenAI CEO, while faithfully rendering a present where it’s anybody’s guess what comes next.

Under growing reactionary threat, the Graz art festival seems willing to risk contradiction, ambiguity, even productive misunderstanding – but not yet the tenets of the “avant-garde.”

At Fotografiska Berlin, an immersion in teen image-making brings the algorithmic feed to light – and finds, among all the put-ons, peer pressure, and propaganda, the youth are talking straight.

Designed by Peter Zumthor, the new Geffen Galleries mirror back the bombast and beauty of urban Los Angeles, even as the museum’s first collection rehang attests that architecture alone can’t reorgani...

With recent commissions from Arca, Basel Social Club, and the Skrillex-led festival CONTRA, the Paris studio of Pierre Dagba and Felix Ward is reminding culture that space is everything we can’t see.

Fresh off touring her newest record, the avant-pop musician counts her blessings: the amnesia of powerful feelings, her newest artistic obsession, and that songs will outlive us all.

A week in Cologne among leather relics, Fassbinder ghosts, museum directors, queer courts, and potato chips on pizza. Institutional critique turns camp; dignity lasts about an hour.

Berlin Art Week is a feast for the eyes. But what about the mouth, the ears – and shaking ass? Get the menu from the most fashionable comms girlies around town.

Curated by Nancy Spector, a Venice exhibition poses rhymes of form and theme between two giants of appropriation art – and where their lines break into very different politics.

Debuting in Europe at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, the Japanese artist’s experiment in twisting free of the system begins by seeing it from our armpits, hips, toes.

The Volksbühne opened it’s 2026/27 season with a free swimming pool. As much as it’s made truly public culture, the Volksbad reflects that contemporary politics can’t escape theater.

At a Biennale that doubles as a memorial to Koyo Kouoh, Henrike Naumann, and others, a Spike contributing editor stops to ask: what is art’s task in a world that deserves evermore mourning?

Taking its name from Françoise Sagan’s 1954 Riviera novel, an exhibition anchored by painter Friedrich Kunath’s studio bar is moody, languid, a bit of a hot mess – that is, incomparably summer.

For those rare hours, a Spike editor picks four fictions to be absorbed, moved, disturbed, and intoxicated by; plus a lucid and equally heady history of quantum physics.

Amid the latest revival of SPIRITUALITY in culture, Spike’s Summer 2026 issue asks: what are people reaching for beyond what can be measured?

An exhibition deft at queering language, images, and other archives locates, but never quite settles, the thorny problem of holding open meaning.

Art materials odd and fabulous abound after Zurich Art Weekend, from moose hide and paint waste to liquid latex and Fabergé eggs.

With an exhibition at Fotografiska Berlin, an iconic and icon-making photographer considers the empathy of confrontational images and why making his best work is like street-fighting.

In an era of internet click baits, rug pulls, and thirst traps, a Berlin exhibition locates the “reality” of digital images not in their representation, but their seduction.

Nuder, bloodier, and more bombastically stunty than ever, the Austrian choreographer’s latest toasts the body’s inexhaustible surprise and the backstage of spectacular images.

AI has pushed the medium of modernity to a breaking point. Perhaps a necessary one, if we are ever to escape back to reality’s unstable, infinite, and unknowable ground.

At the 61st Venice Biennale, Alexandre Estrela discusses the origins of Apple wallpaper in “unspoiled” nature and why he turned the Portuguese Pavilion into a live seismograph.

At the Konschthal Esch group show “état bruit” (state of noise), the artist duo marks its 20th anniversary with two jukeboxes stocked with modern life’s quietest griefs.

Billy Bultheel, Alexander Iezzi, Ivan Cheng, and Cem Dukkha share the secret of their noisy, strobing, transcendent new album: cringe will set you free. Premiering the live video collab of “F**k U”

Year two of Helsinki Music Week showed that, if subculture is dead, it’s places like the Finnish capital that will resurrect DIY/punk – albeit in the key of neo-EDM.

Where the iconic 2007 building mirrored a techno-optimist, post-internet culture, the institution’s latest expansion, by OMA, is a fitting home for digital art after the Great Weirding.

The artist behind @freeze_magazine takes in the thrills and spills of a too-sunny Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026. Plus! a ranking of the best gardens for an apero.

In a new biopic set entirely in his studio, the archetypal Berlin artist plays both subject and saboteur. Is it a canny revival via self-exposure – or the last refuge of myth of the solitary genius?

Kids these days: how are they keeping on, as hypermediation threatens to glitch out the future? As it turns out, by doing what youth has always done: finding profound meaning in the most unexpected pl...

Under her direction since 2021, living up to first principles at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, colloquially the MAK, begins with knowing where the present is.

The designer behind Civilization, the new-look Interview, and the rollout of Rosalía’s latest album on the state of images and the untiring (ir)reason of magazines.

What can non-human performance art tell us about Moltbook, the much-hyped, Reddit-like forum for AI agents? That there’s an update underway to spectatorship’s terms and conditions.

If humanity can’t see a shrink about the climate crisis, what can art offer in shaking us awake? An artist known for deeply troubling what constitutes “Nature” muses from the KunstHausWien.

At a playful exhibition at Konschthal Esch, Luxembourg, the new media artist calls for letting meaning grow slowly in the viewer – and teases the notion of collecting a video 1000 years long.

Reimagining one’s gay self in pattern mash-ups from Op Art and AbEx to graffiti, Richard Hawkins’s Kunsthalle Wien exhibition frames painting as freedom quest – and an earthly pleasure besides.