A leading conservator of contemporary art on working with the likes of elephant dung, the fingerprints of Matthew Barney as Harry Houdini, and the evolution of an artist’s “sanction.”

In Hong Kong, Olivia Shao’s counterpointing of tomb artifacts and works by Kazuo Ohno, Wucius Wong, and others italicizes the Chinese aesthetics written into contemporary art.

Is Berlin’s art scene really getting out of a rut, or did we all drink one glass of sun too many? Five exhibitions stood out in a (re)divided city.

Zodiac hate crime, going a decade without meals, seeking revenge in Barthes – wisdom is a fruit of the most regrettable choices, truth only what you can annul. An excerpt from saké blue.

In Graz, an exhibition of ambiguous narratives in bright acrylic color fields playfully suspends the paradigm of painterly embodiment.

The author of a new collection of art criticism and conversation on pitching oneself towards one’s idols, grappling with broken collectivity, and loving what can’t love you back.

A sprawling group show in Berlin emits the feelings of awe, impotence, and conspiracy roused by the impossibility of understanding our digital present.

How do you do culture in a distracting and fragmented mediascape? If age-old strategies of amplification and withdrawal no longer work, art must find a new way to deal with the noise of crisis.

As the Art World descends on Venice’s canals for the 60th Biennale, Spike’s hedonist columnist dishes out the best way to get drunk between bridges and where to eat like Hemingway.

If Pharrell’s LVMH appointment pulled up the ladder into luxury, young upstarts need new precarity tactics: brand consulting, mooching off art, perhaps rejecting corporate “fashion” outright.

Is Western liberalism really on its deathbed? Four voices in art and politics convene for a roundtable on censorship, what the hell is happening in Germany, and art’s role on the precipice of doom.

Portraying the body public like body-horror film, the South Korean artist’s oozing, wheezing sculptures show the difference between flesh and machines to be uncomfortably small.

A Los Angeles exhibition devoid of biography, photographs, and explanations turns museum-going conventions into vectors for measuring empty space.

The director of Fresh Kill reflects on fusing gender hacking, queer media activism, and a parable of environmental racism into a (newly restored) avant-anarcho eco-satire.

A journey into the sugary heart of gay romance, from yaoi to E.M. Forster, raises the question: Why is gay happiness so controversial? Is it just because they’re having better sex?

Beyond affirming that fashioning a new self is often a matter of class, the French author’s coming-out auto-fiction is a cold, hard accounting of being bored shitless.

Inspired by Octavia Butler’s sci-fi, a Munich exhibition centered on live simulation and painting’s latent space suggests how post-human interbreeds might perceive.

Drawn from martial arts, the fantasy of an underworld peopled by noble outcasts has marked decades of Chinese cinema and recent art on the coincidences of immigrant life.

Need a foot massage during Art Basel Hong Kong? A Spike confidante has some suggestions – and plenty of tips on the city’s best dim sum, speakeasies, and cha chaang tengs.

In Vienna, bold figurative paintings by Cathrin Hoffmann, Laurent Proux, and Pieter Schoolwerth render the nightmarish gaps between visceral and virtual realities.

What happened during LA art week? A little woo woo for white women, Eartheater doing her occult thing, some shop talk about drugs. But there are rich people complaining everywhere these days.

Her second choreography with Adèle Haenel raises the question: Is talking through childhood trauma an ode to new beginnings, or just another turn round an endless carousel?